Inverness, Ill. — Kelley Blue Book and RouteOne joined the founding members of Open Secure Access, Inc., Autobytel Inc., AutoTrader.com, CARFAX, Cars.com, CarsDirect.com, The Cobalt Group, DealerTrack, and JMsolutions on the OSA Steering Committee. OSA was formed to help develop data security protocols and to promote innovation and dealer profitability via efficient access to dealer-owned and dealer-permissioned data.

"Because of Kelley Blue Book's relationship with more than ten thousand dealers across the country and because our information and management tools are integral to the dealer's processes, the need for secure access to dealer management systems has become a shared priority," said Paul Johnson, president of Kelley Blue Book and kbb.com. "We stand together with OSA in striving to create an environment where the dealer's data is secure, but available to 'select value-add business partners.'"

Mike Jurecki, CEO of RouteOne said, "Dealers are under increasing profit pressure. OSA is pushing for the availability of cost effective and high quality solutions where Dealers can select partners that bring the most value to their dealerships and are able to fit within a secure IT framework. RouteOne is pleased to work with OSA toward a common goal of providing dealers with the choices they need to manage their business in a high quality, secure, affordable and compliant manner."

OSA has been working with DMS providers to implement the five key OSA principles:

1. Dealers should control who is allowed to have access to their data.

2. The connection between retail automotive systems should be secure and the privacy of data protected.

3. Third parties that have dealer permission to access DMS data should either be able to access the data through their own efforts or through the services of a company providing data extraction or integration services.

4. Once a third party is generally authorized to access dealer data by a DMS provider, then, given individual Dealer permission, the process of setting up that Dealer and accessing the data should be administratively and procedurally simple.

5. Third parties should have read/write access to all of the data

available to a DMS user either through a robust set of API system functionality, or direct access to the database.