ddddarkbull: If I were making this decision, I would think about the following (at least) because once you make this decision, the company will, in all probability, be stuck with this FEA package forever. Besides, but I am not sure since it depends on where you are, some of these decisions may have legal implications as well.
a) How critical/important is FE analysis to what my goals are? Do I need FEA from hereon as long as I can foresee or can I simply hire a professional consultant and get the job done? If not, do I have enough resources (financial, competent human, and time) to invest in FEA?
b) Is my "FE analyst" good at modeling? In other words, does the person "know" what the "black box" really does? Does the person know what needs to be done or are they supposed to learn it? What kinds of
"fancy stuff" will be involved (nonlinearities, plasticity, fracture, material modeling, etc.)? The more the "fancy stuff", the trickier the modeling gets. Should they be trained or should I expect them to learn by going through the documentation? How long will that take? Can I afford to spend that much time (and money)? It is well-known that FEA has a steep learning curve to it. Can my FE analyst solve some benchmark problems in the areas of interest and understand what the limitations are?
c) What types of analyses are of most interest to me? And which software package is relatively more well-known in those areas? For example, in crash testing, one package may be more well-known than the rest. This can be very helpful in the long run because my FE analyst will have an eco-system, and not just the technical support guys, to rely upon.
d) Do I need associated software (pre and post-processor)? Or should I go with a bundled package (ANSYS, ABAQUS, UG, LS-DYNA, and many more)? This may seem like a no-brainer but sometimes pre-processing (preparing the geometry, meshing, applying BCs etc.) can be harder than the analysis itself. The opposite is true in many situations as well. Where do our problems fit in in this continuum?
e) There are cheap and free alternatives too but help will be hard to find! For example, one of the founders of FEA at Berkeley has a freely downloadable software package and another one at Harvard sells his package for free if you purchase his book. There are others as well.
Most of the famous packages will be able to import files from SolidWorks. That said, ABAQUS was recently bought by Dassault Systemes which also sells SolidWorks and CATIA. In the long run, I'd expect these packages to work together very well. For example, in its next release, ABAQUS allows one to make a geometry out of the deformed output. That said, do I care about long-term seamless integration of these packages?
~!ce.
