Tyler Scoops Up MobileEyes In Latest Acquisition

Tyler Technologies’ acquisition engine is humming along with the purchase of another small company designed to help the solution provider do big things for local government clients.

All told this year, Tyler has completed four acquisitions for a total of about $175 million, CFO Brian Miller told CRN.

The company announced yesterday that it picked up 15-employee TradeMaster Inc., commonly known in the industry as MobileEyes, a company that develops software to improve public safety by supporting fire prevention and suppression, emergency response, and structural safety. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“Really it touches two worlds within Tyler,” Miller said. “One is the public safety side. Their products are used by fire departments, fire marshals, fire prevention officers, fire inspectors, and there’s a responder application that provides information to first responders on layout, construction, occupants of a structure. It also fits in with our planning and regulatory application, our Energov product, which is more on the licensing and permitting side.”

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Miller said MobileEyes – a SaaS based solution with 240 customers -- gathers information regarding new construction, inspections, building permits, the fire prevention aspects of those inspections. He said the permitting and inspecting function is where Tyler sees the biggest play.

“The bigger side of the product is the fire prevention side that has to do with the inspections,” he said. “The surveys, the sprinkler and alarm, and then pre-incident planning for how firefighters would respond to a particular location. We believe it strengthens two product suites of Tylers by adding functionality and features.”

Tyler has been boutique shopping for the last year, adding capabilities to its line up of solutions in town, city, county, and state government. The acquisitions include the AI-enhanced data analytics firm Socrata, Sage, the Maine-based security solution provider, and CaseloadPRO, which gives probation officers a robust tool to track defendants.

“Our mission is to provide essential applications that public sector needs to run their operations and that we want to be a leader in providing all of those essential applications,” Miller said. “We believe that today we have a much broader line of software solutions than anyone else serving the public sector, but we don’t have everything. So we look to continually strengthen our product offerings either by making targeted strategic acquisitions that fill in a gap, or add a technology, or by internal builds.”

Miller said Tyler has also increased its R&D budget by 30 percent this year, so it also can grow solutions organically.

“Sometimes we expand our product offering by acquisitions,” he said. “Sometimes it’s by internal build, but it’s all just a continuation of the same strategy: taking products that aren’t industry leaders and moving them into a leadership position and continuing to strengthen those products where we already have a leadership position.”