You may think the whole point of going camping is ditching the tech. Fresh air, a sleeping bag, a campfire—who needs software for that? Well, the recreation and tourism industries run on software, for everything from renting canoes to parking your RV to obtaining licenses, park entries, tour bookings, and more.

Tyler Technologies—a Plano-based Fortune 500 govtech company—just invested in all that by acquiring US eDirect, a leading international provider of tech solutions for campground and outdoor recreation management.

US eDirect manages transactions you make in the great outdoors

Founded in 1999 and based in Roslyn Heights, New York, US eDirect currently serves 40 clients in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  If you want to visit Florida State Parks, Ohio State Parks, Minnesota State Parks, Missouri State Parks, and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service sites in Australia, chances are you’ll be using US eDirect’s Recreation Dynamics product.

Recreation Dynamics is an enterprise-grade cloud transaction management system focused on government-run recreation and tourism operations. Powered by Amazon Web Services, the solution manages transactions related to everything from booking campground accommodations to registering for events to simply getting past that first gate at a park.

Follows Tyler’s 2021 acquisition of NIC

This latest acquisition follows Tyler’s April 2021 buy-up of NIC, a leader in digital government solutions and payments. 

Elizabeth Proudfit, president of Tyler Technologies’ NIC division. [Photo: NIC]

“The acquisition of US eDirect augments our current outdoor solution portfolio, allowing us to offer an extensive ‘all in one’ outdoor recreation solution that will seamlessly integrate with our NIC payments platform,” said Elizabeth Proudfit, president of Tyler’s NIC division, in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming the US eDirect team into the NIC and Tyler family and building on our 20 years of experience in outdoor recreation with a new comprehensive and scalable solution for our public sector clients.”’

US eDirect’s CEO, Tony Alex, thinks the two companies make good tent-mates.

“Our expertise in outdoor recreation management combined with Tyler’s proficiency in the government payments space will allow us to bring more efficiency to our clients,” Alex said in the statement. “With little client overlap, we also have the opportunity to expand this premier solution to additional local and international markets.”

The outdoors are so hot now. And we don’t mean temperature.

Ever since the early days of the pandemic, people stuck indoors worldwide looked out their windows and yearned for escape. Not just to the front yard or a nearby restaurant, but to a national park, a treasured trout stream, an awe-inspiring natural landscape. 

That’s made the whole industry related to recreation and camping as hot as ever, if. not more so. And it’s why when Tyler looks out its windows, it must be seeing opportunity over the horizon. (And possibly a trout jumping, too.)

They’ve been seizing those opportunities, too. Tyler has been named to Government Technology’s GovTech 100 list five times and has been recognized three times on Forbes’ “Most Innovative Growth Companies” list. It has clients in all 50 states, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, and other international locations.

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