Tyler Technologies Acquires Socrata

It has recently been announced that Tyler Technologies has acquired Socrata. Tyler is one of the older government-focused technology companies in the market today and offers a large array of software. Socrata, which launched in 2007, is the company largely responsible for popularizing the concept of open data among state and local government, particular platforms that make available interactive data.

Fundamentally, Tyler and Socrata are both government data companies, one of which taking in data and the other seeking to make it more available, and therefore more useful. A big piece of the melding of the two companies will be how Socrata can unlock the data coming out of Tyler’s products. Socrata will play an increasingly large role as a government data integrator, a role that the company has been shifting towards for a while. Last year, Socrata achieved FedRAMP certification, which is the bar for cybersecurity that must be met for an entity to receive access to work with nonpublic government data. This would include the type of data that is in Tyler systems.

Tyler also expects to push more data sharing between governments now that a data-sharing company is joining its ranks. The idea is that government agencies will not only be able to look at how they’re performing, but also compare their data to regional neighbors and their peers. Open data appears to be an important priority for state and local government IT leaders, and it will be interesting to see that ways in which this merger may affect this market in the months and years ahead.

Source: GovTech