How many copies of FileMaker software are there in the wild? And how many are FMI selling each year?
FileMaker supply a corporate fact sheet ([PDF] April 7, 2016) and there wss additional information in the executive profile of Dominique Goupil (date unknown but not updated between March 2011 & December 2013). From these we know that:
There is insufficient information publicly available to investigate the second claim, but for the first, and hence the third, it is possible to cobble together some sort of history of the total number of units shipped.
Going back in time: on three occasions FileMaker Inc. have issued press releases stating the sales for a version or financial year:
In addition to publicly stating sales figures for FM 5.5 & 7 FileMaker have, on a number of occasions, issued statements giving the total number of units shipped in press releases.
| Date | Units shipped (millions) |
Notes |
|---|---|---|
| November 11, 1999 | 3 |
|
| May 5, 2001 | 6.75 |
|
| April 8, 2002 | 7.5 |
|
| March 9, 2004 | 9 |
|
| March 9, 2005 | 10 |
|
| March 10, 2006 | 11 |
|
| August 8, 2006 | 12 |
|
| July 7, 2007 | 13 |
|
| January 5, 2009 | 14 |
|
| September 2, 2009 | 15 |
|
| September 1, 2010 | 16 |
|
| July, 2013 | 18 |
|
| December 4, 2013 | 20 |
|
| April 7, 20136 | 24 |
|
Note: the date given is the earliest date found for a report of shipping the relevant number of units.
Charting the values over time gives:
Three things are immediately apparent:
there is a noticeably larger number of units shipped for version 5 than for subsequent releases
the rate of increase from version 5.5 onward is remarkably consistent (a graph of FileMaker's actual sales would not be this smooth; sales for software tend to look rather like a saw-tooth, with quick rise to a peak shortly after the launch of a new version followed by a consistent decrease in sales over time until the next release).
there is a sharp increase in unit shipped between during 2013 and there is an increased rate after than
To examine the first of these: the large number of units shipped for version 5 may indicate a very successful release, but it seems likely, particularly in light of the consistency across later versions, that other factors may be at work.
Site license and volume purchasing agreements tend to inflate the number of units sold since for most organisations there comes a point at which it makes more sense to move to the next tier for pricing reasons.
It's not clear if sales of the renewal of annual licenses and volume license maintenance agreements are included, but these would also inflate the number of units shipped. With boxed software a customer may purchase a copy and then, a couple of years later, purchase an upgrade… giving two sales across 4 or 5 years. With a site license or a maintenance agreement there is a sale every year as the agreement is is renewed.
For the the third point: in part this is due to the lengthy gap between the announcements of 16 and 18 million units having shipped, the latter figure was reached earlier than the public announcements indicate. But much of the increase is because the most recent values are not directly comparable to previous ones. From the corporate fact sheet, "more than 24 million units of FileMaker client software delivered, including over 2 million downloads of FileMaker Go"; previous fact sheets used the wording "more than XX million units shipped" [of FileMaker Pro]. Adjusting this for compatibility with previously announced figures give a total of 22 million (approx.) bringing the increase back into line.
Excluding the anomalous (first) value, adjusting for shipments of FileMaker Go, and fitting a trend (least squares linear regression) line gives:
This provides a very good fit and a mean value for the number of units shipped each year approximately 1 million (±62k), in line with public statements.
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© 2016 Mark Banks. Last modified: August 2, 2016