Tyler Technologies Leads Digital Tsunami

Successful investing is about riding big trends. Digital transformation is the single biggest investment trend in our lifetime, and it is only getting started.

Tyler Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: TYL) is set up to win big as the digital transformation wave rolls across municipal, state and federal government offices.

The Plano, Texas-based company is not a typical software concern. The business began life as a conglomerate with interests in trucking, explosives and sewage pipes.

Company founder Joseph McKinney started his career in 1960 as a venture capitalist.

By the age of 28, he was a millionaire and looking for his next big opportunity. That business was Saturn Industries, an amalgamation of three defense contractors.

During the next three decades, Saturn turned into Tyler Industries, and annual sales swelled to $1.1 billion.

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Then, McKinney dismantled the entire enterprise and returned the capital to shareholders.

Tyler Industries was the shell company that in 1997 became Tyler Technologies. And that’s when everything changed.

New corporate managers could see what the internet was doing to paper. They began building a platform to digitize the mountains of paperwork that was gumming up municipal and state governments all over the country.

Better still, the fledging software platform was being mostly left alone by bigger vendors like Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL), SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) due to a culture clash with local governments and near-glacial sales cycles.

From the beginning, Tyler product and sales managers were smart, too.

They built software suites around:

  • Courts and justice
  • Records and tax
  • Public safety
  • Enterprise resource planning
  • Regulatory
  • Appraisals
  • Schools

A clever perpetual licensing platform meant small governments could buy software once and get continual upgrades as long as they maintained valid subscriptions. The platform began to catch on.

Tyler built the first software tools to move local and state court filings online. Today, lawyers all over the country use this system to uniformly file and send court dockets.

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County courthouses that used to be overcome with boxes of paper documents are now completely online. And the same base code helps people pay parking tickets and property taxes.

Other software modules help cities run 911 emergency systems. The company fielded 31 million emergency calls during 2018 for 15,000 local and state governments, both large and small.

And the company covers a broad spectrum of areas: from Los Angeles County, with a population of 10.1 million, to tiny towns in Texas, home to less than 100.

That goes to show that the size of the opportunity is breathtaking.

Paper forms have kept key parts of government siloed. Digitizing the operating systems of cities and states decreases bottlenecks. It makes the public sector efficient. And the marketplace for lean government is insatiable.

As of writing, shares trade at 105 times forward earnings and 16.8 times sales.

 

Although these metrics may seem expensive, shares are down from where they traded in March when Tyler managers announced the $2.3 billion acquisition of NIC, the leading online payment platform for government services.

Best wishes,

Jon D. Markman

About the Editor

Jon D. Markman is winner of the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding financial journalism and the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi award. He was also on Los Angeles Times staffs that won Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. He invented Microsoft’s StockScouter, the world’s first online app for analyzing and picking stocks.

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