Dealer Solutions Celebrates 20 Years
Dealer Solutions celebrates 20 years of helping Australian motor dealers utilise technology to improve the performance of their day to day business.
At the time Dealer Solutions was founded, many people weren’t even aware there was a thing called the Internet. Actually, many customers didn’t even have computers. So the solutions offered in the early days also included the purchase of computers.
Damian Jones, Chief Operating Officer of Dealer Solutions shares his thoughts about those times, “Computers were not what they are today. They were much slower and the hard drives were only about 4MB. We did our development in DOS and the screens were the old black and blue text. Windows didn’t exist. It was funny because we didn’t actually change from DOS to Windows until about 2000 with some of our software because people liked the DOS screens and were resistant to change.”
“Internet seriously started in business around 1996 and before then none of our solutions were web based. We dabbled in the internet and provided systems for car dealers to be able to put their inventory online. It wasn’t very successful because most businesses considered the internet to be a fad, something that would be used at school or university and they weren’t able to see the business application at all. Our systems have certainly grown. Now everything is online or in Windows and is designed to work high speed on the internet and we have also reconfigured things to work on tablet devices such as iPhones and iPads. At present, internet applications equate to over 50% of our business. We have adapted and changed our solutions over the last 20 years to suit our customers and the technology available. We are looking forward to what the next 20 years will bring,” he adds.
Dealer Solutions have grown into an industry leader and are now Australia’s largest independent provider of data aggregation services for motor dealers. They have a national presence with offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide and their client base extends to over 3,000 dealership locations around Australia and New Zealand.
They have also delivered many Australian firsts, such as the computerisation of Motor Vehicle Registration and Transfer functions with QLD Transport, creation of the first industry based portal with the Motor Trades Association of Queensland, and State based legislative compliance functions for motor dealers.
Dealer Solutions had never contracted any external software development resources before Mitrais. Mr Jones said, “We had considered it but were very sceptical and unsure about offshore development. We engaged Mitrais after Mike Page, Mitrais’ VP of Software Development introduced himself to us and offered to explain what services Mitrais had to offer. After that initial meeting we were impressed with Mike and his knowledge and experience with offshore development and thought partnering with Mitrais would be a positive step for our business.”
When asked about their experience partnering with Mitrais, Mr Jones replied, “We’ve been partnering with Mitrais for over two years now and have found the Mitrais staff to be very professional and conscientious.”
What does the future hold for Dealer Solutions? They see the internet as, being ‘young’ in terms of what dealers are doing with their online marketing. “Dealers seem to be stuck in the traditional newspaper advertising or offline marketing. We are very active with companies like Google; Dealer Solutions is currently a Google Premier SME partner for Google AdWords. We are helping dealers continue to learn about the internet and how they can market their brand online. The big online trend at the moment is social media, Facebook and Twitter can be integrated into the systems that we provide dealers, so they are able to contact their customers, the car buying public online,” comments Mr. Jones.
