The rumor on the street is their owner is looking to get out and there just may be a competitor with a not so hot product looking to buy... Regardless the ERA system is on a one way track to looserville. And that is sad, because the product does work.
Sweet. Maybe someone will develop a service for retail auto that is a modern management system, cause as of this moment you can not find a DMS vendor that is using modern technology.
And now the discussion starts, what is modern technology? Well, to start an API would be nice, and oh yeah, we (the dealers) should not have to pay for it, build it in to your product. And since not all dealerships operate the same, lets open up the user interface to the dealer for customization, what is important to them. Then lets add collaboration to the DMS, in every instance. Oh wait, what about moving away from the server client paradigm and joining the rest of humanity with operating system agnostic user interfaces, I.E. Adobe Air or HTML+Javascript, with HTML5 we are moving toward a more capable UI in the browser.
I feel the big difference will happen when someone (not Microsoft, they don't get it) can take the retail automotive vertical to the "Cloud" and staff with support staff and trainers that understand retail automotive.
Stop re-inventing the wheel, use a proven infrastructure, success by database design, not UI controls.
Any VC Angels out there reading this? Lets go...
