Yes, Yes, Yes!
The reality of business is that mundane operations such as many tasks currently housed within a DMS on a local CPU can be moved to web-delivery. The real value of this is in the elimination of much of the "infrastructure" within the dealers four walls (such as CPU's/servers), by moving them to a centrally managed facility. In many ways, dealers with remote stores do some of this today - connecting 2nd, 3rd, XXth, stores via communication lines to a server located in their "main" facility. The ideal scenario arises when dealers can off-load activities such as back-ups, system maintenance, etc, can leverage multiple businesses off of one server, and can lease access to applications or seats and can turn them on and off as needed, and can include a technology refresh into the seat price.
The reality of the matter is that we along with several other business partners are about to announce this type of solution for an entire network of dealers associated with a single OEM here in the U.S. Please stay tuned as we anticipate piloting this scenario this summer (2000).
[This message has been edited by Matt Parsons (edited 06-01-2000).]