March 2006 saw the Stardraw.com website deliver more than 100GB of data in a single month for the first time.
Marketing director Rob Robinson explains, "We have seen steady growth in the distribution of data relating to all Stardraw products for some time, but it is remarkable that downloads from www.stardraw.com have almost tripled since this time last year. Breaking the 100GB/month mark so soon frankly caught us by surprise--charting the month-on-month trend in 2005 suggested that we wouldn't reach this point until next year."
Stardraw.com has delivered all its products exclusively through its website since January 2002. In addition to the initial installation of long-established design/documentation tools like Stardraw A/V and Stardraw Lighting 2D, users employ the website to download program updates and to access libraries of more than 50,000 high-quality symbols.
However, most Stardraw users only use a small proportion of the libraries, choosing just the brands they need from 400+ manufacturer libraries. Since the average symbol size is less than 20KB, symbols alone cannot explain the massive growth in website usage.
The huge growth is most likely due to Stardraw.com's new products and the increasing number of OEM implementations. Third-party (OEM) applications based on Stardraw technologies, including RCI Custom's PanelBuilder, Middle Atlantic Products' RackTools 3.0, and Simply Reliable Software's SRS Draw, all utilize Stardraw.com's webservers to deliver program files and data. In addition, Stardraw Control, the new application designed to create custom user interfaces to control any hardware device using any protocol, has been well received throughout the industry, with around 4,000 installations.
"The web stats confirm that our innovative business models, advanced delivery systems and cutting edge products are currently in use by nearly 20,000 people worldwide - and that figure doesn't include the more than 1,000 monthly demo downloads of our design/documentation applications," says Robertson. "We now fully expect to break 200GB/month well before the end of the year, meaning 1.7 Terabytes will be downloaded from www.stardraw.com during 2006, and that's a great public endorsement."