Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Your first question comes from Greg Dunham – Deutsche Bank.
Greg Dunham – Deutsche Bank
I want to hit on the maintenance business. This is over half of revenues now and your forecast of $5 million sequential decline quarter over quarter. I know that some of that is seasonality and some of that if FX but there's got to some attrition out of that, specifically in the CAD business. Can you talk about renewal rates and what you're seeing on the attrition front within CAD as well as long term?
Cornelius Moses
Actually there has not been any attrition. I know that something that everyone is concerned about, and if we're in a long, long economic downturn, maybe we'd be concerned about as well. But we haven't seen it yet. As a matter of fact our renewal rates and attach rates are actually up.
What we're seeing on the maintenance revenue side, we are seeing a little bit of a currency headwind, I think as we mentioned in our prepared remarks. And now, we've just anniversaried Co-create in terms of maintenance revenue in the first quarter. But even if you strip Co-create out of it, our maintenance revenue was up 4% for the quarter, and that's with the currency headwind.
So I think underscores how important that business is to us at this point in time and we're hopeful that we continue to improve the attach and renewal rates even though we're in a difficult environment.
Richard Harrison
In addition to that Neil, I think that in fact the number of seats under maintenance, total seats for all products increased again in Q1 over Q4. It's been increasing every quarter for the last eight quarters, and we ended Q1 with it looks like 915,000 seats under maintenance, up from 899,000 in the September quarter. There hasn't been any attrition in terms of active users paying maintenance. In fact, it's increased.
Greg Dunham – Deutsche Bank
One important point, I think a lot of people would assume or make analogous your CAD business say to Autodesk CAD business where I think people are expecting more attrition, can you talk about the differences between the two and how maybe the high end is less sensitive?
James Heppleman
I think the biggest difference is our CAD business is comprised almost entirely of perpetual seats and maintenance. That is simply not the situation for Autodesk. They're selling seats and largely selling upgrades. And upgrades are I guess a form of maintenance but structured very differently and very easy to opt out of for another year.
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