SolidWorks' VAR Business Model??

I have a feeling you are getting a half-truth. In other words, enough of the truth as it affects your organization.

Dassault is going through a rebranding of their image and SolidWorks is now going to be branded more inline with D's other product offerings. I expect a lot of changes on the SolidWorks front as it finally gets assimilated into the D organization instead of the merry individualism it has been able to maintain to date.

Since my consulting work is now getting more and more forced to use Solidworks (a product I haven't invested into yet) and a potential change of employers coming my way to move from Edge to Works, leaves me wondering what potential changes are REALLY in store for Solidworks. So far, no rebranding of SolidEdge under the larger corporate umbrella has been overlly beneficial for that particular product. I think Works will get the short end of this deal also.

--Scott

Every now and then a VAR gets booted, usually because they aren't making their sales numbers, but sometimes for technical quality issues or because they tried to pull a fast one. SW occasionally culls the field for various reasons. I highly doubt that this has anything to do with Dassault, or even that the different situations are related. The SW reseller chain is a pretty cutthroat business, and VARs come and go.

Swizzle, Brian, and Matt, Thank you for your responses.

The main reason for the post was to determine if this was an isolated event at this time or is SolidWorks looking at changing their overall dealings with VARs.

In other post within this UG, there is a lot of questioning to the value in the "Value-Added Reseller." Maybe I was being optimistic that this was the first move to have users contact SolidWorks directly.

Thank you again for your responses.

I checked out your website. MN, ey?

I'm surprised that with the size of your machine designs that you are not using SE. In terms of where SE and SW actually play one-up-manship, Edge handles massive assemblies much better than Works. And your machines look massive.

I'd like to hear about some of your assembly techniques to maintain performance using Works. I also see you have openings for Mechanical Engineers. I have no intention of ever moving back to the snow and cold, but I do consulting work - hint hint. Remotely.

- they're called 'caves' ...

Rick ;-)

And speaking of top notch consultants very familiar with large machine design for the food and beverage industry. Too bad his toilets flush funny. And he can find me in this newsgroup as well as the SE newsgroup to be able to harass me. Back to the bbsnotes for me.

Thanks, Rick.

--Scott W.

Actually, they are following the path that Autodesk has taken. Small resellers are becoming extinct. Large resellers have lots of pull with Adesk, SW and others. It saves the software maker big bucks by having less shipping and billing addresses... Autodesk started this trend about 10 years ago, and uncounted good resellers bit the dust.

It's a shame too, since most large resellers are box movers and in bed with large corporations with hundreds of seats. The small ( 1-50 user) customer is left in the lerch.

I was one of those resellers forced to merge or be terminated. I'm much happier now that I just do training and consulting without playing the political games.