[jballanc]

It is extremely hard!

Dealerships don't make most of their money (or any money, really) selling cars. They make their money from service, and selling info to 3rd parties (ever notice when you buy a new car, you will receive mail from SirusXM for a year after). In order for this to work, their systems are all tightly integrated. When you buy a new car, the dealer will know when you're due for service. When you have your current car serviced more than a certain amount, the dealer will know you're in the market for a new car.

So, it's not possible to swap out only the service management piece of CDK or only the sales piece, or only the CRM piece. They all have to work together. The reason I know is I happened to contract with the IT department of a very large dealer network at the time they were undergoing a migration from Reynolds to CDK. A year into the migration process...they pulled the plug. Moving even from one large incumbent to another was too much work.

Good luck breaking in on that as a brand new baby startup! I think you'd probably have better luck completely disrupting the car sales process from the ground up.

[olyjohn]

CDK didn't just run the DMS. They operated the physical networks at the dealerships, managed the the PCs, the phone system, even leased the dealers their printers. CDK was DEEPLY integrated into the dealerships.