Perpetual license enables life-time access to the application. So the application will continue to run forever on the computer the license was bought for.
However, to get access to new versions and releases the annual maintenance must be paid additionally. Maintenance price is a fraction of a full license price but grants access to all updates, typically four times a year.
Keeping maintenance current is much more cost-effective, as we continuously release enhancements, bug fixes and add support of new file formats. For example, NX and Creo in 3.8.0, glTF, COLLADA, and DXF in 3.7.0, FBX in 3.6.0, SolidWorks in 3.4.2 and so on. Users with active maintenance can simply upgrade to the new version to get the access to previously unavailable formats.