Think for a moment about the software applications you use every day: Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon, Netflix. Maybe you use Salesforce, QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, or Netsuite for your business. How much time do you worry about getting a software upgrade from any of those products and the effect it might have on your business or you personally? Probably never.
Now consider your Equipment Dealer Management System (DMS), the lifeblood of your business. Do you ever stop and think about an upgrade from your provider? Perhaps you dream longingly at the prospect of an upgrade because your provider promised all sorts of new features, but you have to wait another year to maybe see those promised features and bug fixes. Or worse, maybe you dread an upgrade because the last two were so disruptive to your business. Either way, if you have to think about an upgrade to your DMS, it likely means your solution is not cloud-based.
Computer software has come an incredibly long way since the turn of the millennium and it has made for huge efficiencies in our work and personal lives. But software that was created in the 90’s and early ‘00s (or, even worse, in the ‘80s!), was delivered in a completely different manner.
In the old days, after the software nerds wrote a product for you, it also needed its own hardware (computer/server) to run on. For enterprise software, like an Equipment Dealer Management System, it meant you also had to buy a computer for that software and you had to physically find a place for it in your dealership. Well, that was great… for the first year. Then you called for support, but no one could see what you saw because your system was standalone. As your business grew, you needed more features, and you needed bugs fixed… but you had to wait for the next upgrade. And your Equipment DMS provider, if they were any good, now had hundreds or thousands of customers, each with their own server in their customers’ buildings. When a new version was ready, they had to get that software physically updated on all of those machines! Now you understand why you got so few upgrades over the years. Further, sometimes an upgrade was like getting an entirely new system, and you had to re-learn something that had become second nature, or worse, it no longer supported your workflows!
In addition, some of those systems that were created back in the 80’s were done with software languages that are now obsolete and very few people are familiar with them, and no young software nerd worth their salt wants to work on dead tech. This ancient software also requires running on ancient hardware because, in order to run on new technology, it would literally require re-writing it from scratch (or by putting an emulator between, which is basically a huge speedbump for system performance). The DMS provider does NOT want to have to spend the millions of dollars it would take to update the technology. That would eat into their margins! They’d rather keep you on dead tech for as long as possible and hope you find a software transition to be simply too painful.
A new way of creating and deploying applications quickly emerged about 10-15 years ago: cloud-based software. As web browsers became more powerful and were able to provide an experience similar to an application that was physically installed on a computer, more and more developers migrated to this method of a software interface. However, few companies could claim to be truly “cloud”, even if their software was in a web browser: the back-end might still be a server under your sales counter. It was with the advent of the Big 3 (Google, Microsoft, and Amazon), who started selling their available computing capacity, that pretty much any software developer could quickly create a new and powerful application in The Cloud.
So, why is cloud-based software so much better than old-school software? Unless you were a keyboard savant with those old products and your needs were very limited, there are a host of benefits of a cloud-based Dealer Management System:
Many legacy Equipment DMS products claim to be cloud-based, but all they did was take that server under your desk and shoved into Google or Amazon’s cloud as a stand-alone server. They didn’t make things better with that change, and in fact, they probably made it worse!! You have the same ancient software, with the same upgrade issues, but the chances are that the product is now 5 times slower. Or they gave you some virtual way to run the product that is clunkier, slower, and so much more painful than ever before.
All you want to do is sell, rent, and fix machines. You really don’t want to have to think about software! Why can’t your dealership's business system just be more like all the other modern-day applications you use!
If any of the above resonates with you, check out Flyntlok. Flyntlok is the largest truly cloud-based Dealer Management System. We provide minor updates and bug fixes on a daily basis, and significant features every two weeks. Don’t believe us? Check out our Release Notes! Flyntlok pushes out more enhancements in two weeks than most legacy Equipment DMS providers push out in a year.
Flyntlok is the Ideal solution for your business with an Infinity of possibilities and one that pushes out features at almost Lightspeed. If you want to C a System that is like a found Purl for your dealership, reach out to a Flyntlok sales Commander who can provide you with a demo.
