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The new digital dealership: thoughts from NADA 2015

Airstrike

Well, it’s a little more than a month after the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Convention and Expo 2015, which brought in more than 23,000 people from 53 different countries. It was one of the busiest shows on record, driven by the continued strength of the industry in the U.S., where retail sales are forecasted to exceed 17M units this year.

My interest was obviously all about technology, and it is truly amazing just how much “help” is available for dealers today. With solutions and services possible for just about anything however, the challenge most are facing is how to choose, how to integrate, and how to manage all of these infrastructure choices.

Transforming the dealership: cloud and mobile

At the show, one theme rang true: technology in the automotive industry is currently going through a massive transformation, mainly driven by cloud and mobile pressure. In fact, by 2020, mobile, cloud, social, and big data technologies will drive at least 80% of the industry’s growth in IT spend.

Dealerships, just like all businesses, are facing the need to embrace this transformation and become digital businesses, fully integrating with the online world operated by their OEM franchise owner. With increasing technology advancements, and increasing connectivity, our industry (that’s the IT industry) needs to find ways to help dealerships to make this shift to the cloud and enable the adoption of mobile devices.

Let’s start first with the shift to cloud and how this delivers great benefits across the whole automotive marketing, sales, and service spectrum. Cloud computing provides businesses with agility, flexibility, and in almost all cases cost savings, and with DSPs adopting Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform—compute, storage, data, networking, and app— dealers are now able to select a rich set of integrated services that help them unify data and get a 360-degree view of the customer. Dealers can save costs by building on their existing technology assets, devices and data to derive business value from their cloud-first enterprise with Azure.

One of the most recent innovations in this space comes from incadea, with the launch of incadea.connect, an Azure-based integration layer that enables simple integration from OEM to dealer, across dealerships, and with 3rd party solution providers. With this platform, incadea is leading the way to addressing the dealerships’ integration challenge.

The adoption of mobile devices in both sales and service operations is equally critical to transforming customer experiences. Mobile devices help sales people greatly broaden their reach, getting them out from behind their desks and onto the showroom floor armed with all the tools they need to make the sale. Mobile devices also help to equip service advisors with the right tools to effortlessly check in customers and vehicles, complete inspections, and build a work order side-by-side with their customer.

While these technologies help to remove limits and enable new opportunities, it’s critical again that we make sure everything is integrated. Both sales and service teams need to have the ability to complete their tasks seamlessly, without having to switch to different devices or return to the desk to complete an action. We also need to make sure mobile devices are properly managed and kept secure. Protecting against any potential customer data leaks should be a high priority concern for any business.

That’s another area where Microsoft can help. Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite is one of the best tools available for managing mobile technology across any business. EMS provides dealers with a unified approach to managing identities, and deeply integrated capabilities for taking care of all their mobile devices, at the same time protecting data with a comprehensive set of access control and data protection capabilities. Given the explosion of Windows-based mobile devices, it is all the more important for dealers to be able to effectively manage their IT in this way.

Highlights from NADA

So back to this year’s NADA Expo, where it was great to see the new solutions and devices from Microsoft partners. Some of the highlights included:

Dominion
Dominion DMS had a strong presence, showcasing their new suite of products running on Dynamics AX and CRM. We worked with Dominion and Dell to help make their booth one of the highlights of the show.

group (1)

Both MOC1 and eLeads, providers of solutions for sales and service lead management, launched their Surface Pro/Windows 8 mobility solutions with strong interest from the dealer community.

Bosch_Flex_Inspect_SP3_and_Samsung

Bosch showed off the latest in Service Bay technology with its Flex Inspect solution—able to complete a detailed electronic diagnostic in just two minutes!

Airstrike

Digital Airstrike showcased its Dealer Sales Lead Management services powered by Microsoft Azure, and on the commercial vehicle side of business, Procede Software demonstrated its latest dealer solutions, focused on 100% uptime and no system lags that could slow down business or impact customer satisfaction.

One of the most talked about news from the show was not about software or devices–it was the merger of Dealertrack Technologies and incadea to create a new global DSP. As automotive OEMs drive their own programs to simplify the DMS landscape, this is one we’ll be watching closely!

Given how quickly the industry is changing and growing, I am looking forward to next year’s NADA Expo, March 31-April 3, 2016 in Las Vegas, to see how the transformation is evolving.

I look forward to seeing many of you there!
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