When David Boatman, former chief information officer of Sonic Automotive Inc., left the dealership group to start his own business, he envisioned a technology company that would make extracting dealership data easy and inexpensive.

Little did he know back in March 2004 that his timing would be just about perfect for starting the Charlotte, N.C., business. Drive Technology Group Inc. is benefiting from the fallout over the Reynolds and Reynolds Co. crackdown on third-party access to dealership management systems.

Reynolds, the largest vendor of U.S. dealership management systems, is shutting down access to modems that it had used to maintain its system. The decision affects hundreds if not thousands of large and small software companies that dealerships hire to extract data from their computer systems.

These vendors typically gain access to the Reynolds system through these maintenance modems.

Drive Technology, with its DriveWay product, does not use maintenance modems. Instead, a dealership buys another license from Reynolds to allow Drive Technology to use the Reynolds system, as if it were a new employee that needed full access to the system.

"We agree that Reynolds and ADP (Reynolds' largest competitor) should be compensated for use of a port into their application, the same way they would if an employee sat down to use ADP or Reynolds," Boatman says.

Drive Technology's DriveWay is middleware -- that is, software that extracts data from the dealership systems, encrypts it and securely sends it to the party that will use the data.

Unlike a modem, which can be slow, DriveWay uses the dealership's high-speed network and bandwidth, Boatman says.

"Now there's no reason for a vendor to get into a dealership's system," says Chris Tynes, chief architect of the DriveWay software. "We are the invisible middle guy."

Boatman's customers are dealership groups that come to him to extract data from across the group's stores, as well as third-party software vendors that dealerships hire to manipulate data. It's common for dealers to hire third parties to update their vehicle inventory for their dealership Web site every day, send service reminders to dealership customers and create marketing campaigns.

Drive Technology has been installing DriveWay since January 2006.

Drive Technology has 50 customers that include dealership groups and third-party software providers.

Upfront costs are less than $100, he says. The middleware installs in a dealership in 15 to 20 minutes and can be done remotely. The average monthly license fee is $50.