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CDK Global sells software that car dealerships use to run their sales, financing, parts, and service operations.
CDK Global is the software backbone of a car dealership. When you walk into a dealership to buy a car or get an oil change, the salesperson and service desk are probably typing into a system that CDK built or bought. The company sells dealership management software — the core system that tracks inventory, handles paperwork, schedules service jobs, and manages parts. It also sells add-ons like customer relationship tools and digital marketing for dealer websites.
The main thing CDK runs is called a dealer management system, or DMS. Think of it as the dealership's central nervous system: every car on the lot, every repair order, every financing deal, and every parts order flows through it. Dealers pay CDK subscription and transaction fees to use it, and once a dealership has wired its whole operation into one DMS, switching is painful and expensive. That lock-in is the business's real moat. CDK also sells to car manufacturers, helping them manage their dealer networks and data, and it serves dealers beyond the US, including in Europe and other markets. The company has a messy corporate history. It was spun out of the information services giant Automatic Data Processing, now Automatic Data Processing, in 2014, and later split its payroll-processing business from its automotive-software business. The automotive piece kept the CDK name and was taken private in 2022 by investment firm Brookfield, which means it no longer trades on NASDAQ. That takeover matters for anyone tracking the stock: the ticker is history. CDK's biggest vulnerability showed up in June 2024, when a cyberattack forced it to shut down its systems for days. Dealerships across the country reportedly had to fall back on paper and manual work, and the outage disrupted operations for thousands of dealers and the manufacturers that depend on them. It was a striking reminder of how much power sits in one company's software — and how much damage a single point of failure can cause.
Its main competitor in dealership software is Cox Automotive, a private division of Cox Enterprises that owns brands like Dealertrack and vAuto, so CDK operates in a market dominated by a handful of big players. As a private company now, CDK does not publish the same detailed financials, but its business model is straightforward: collect recurring fees from dealers who can't easily leave.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026