What to do with extra licenses

[Ferroequine]

Here's a question to all you fellow CAD Managers -- how do you handle license "overload"? My company is preparing a bid on a job that would require about 40 additional AutoCAD seats for a period of approx 1 year. It used to be that you could lease licenses from Autodesk for that kind of spike in manpower. However, I'm told that this is no longer the case. Now, we'd have to buy all the seats we require on this project, and then (presumably) get stuck with all that extra software after the job is done. Can't even sell them second hand...

Has anyone else had to deal with spikes in staffing levels like this? How did you manage it?

[RobertB]

There is no good answer that I'm aware of. You could outsource, you could donate the software (perhaps getting a tax break), or you could eat the cost. I'm not sure there are any other options.

[Brian Myers]

I've never tried this, but some places will Lease AutoCAD. A one year lease would likely cost less than actually purchasing the program. (It wouldn't be cost effective over many years, but for just one year it would likely save you money).

Also, I would assume your employees would make back the cost of the software seats in this project? If you purchased them you could simply keep them and just not renew them when the time to upgrade comes around, after all, they will have paid for themselves.

But I would search on the internet for "Lease AutoCAD 2006" first and see if it can give you any more info on this practice. (Not sure of the legality of this practice, but I've seen it done for schools and seats of LT).

[jaberwok]

But I would search on the internet for "Lease AutoCAD 2006" first and see if it can give you any more info on this practice. (Not sure of the legality of this practice, but I've seen it done for schools and seats of LT).

The legality may vary in different countries. I know of two companies in Britain who lease adesk software though, AFAIK, only in conjunction with hardware.