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After Acquiring Paladin Data Systems, Dude Solutions Rolls out SaaS Permitting and Licensing Software

The company has worked a lot on facilities and asset management in the past, but with Paladin's SmartGov system it's getting into a new space.

After acquiring Paladin Data Systems in April, Dude Solutions is now officially incorporating its SmartGov software for government licensing, permitting and inspections into its suite.

Both companies have been around for more than 20 years, operating in pretty different spaces. Dude’s core work in government has focused on asset management, helping facilities staff to, for example, keep track of HVAC maintenance.

SmartGov is software-as-a-service, and the idea is to streamline the often paper-intensive, in-person processes of getting a government license — and the work that comes along with it.

“You think about putting a fence around your yard, a lot of times you have to get a fencing permit for that,” Dude Solutions CEO Ed Roshitsh said. “With that comes a lot of … GIS information, we provide all of that through the permit. Also payment, costs of permits as well.”

It’s a space Roshitsh said looks very full of old technology.

“A lot of these counties and cities, et cetera, that do licensing and permitting are on legacy, on-[premise], client server implementation,” he said. “So the SaaS technology is a great disrupter.”

The introduction of SmartGov is a branching out for Dude Solutions. The company has about 2,700 government clients, mostly at the municipal level and spanning from small towns up to some larger cities and states. Those are places where Dude is established and it can now start selling permitting and licensing software.

“The overlap was decent, [Paladin] had something less than 200 ‘logos’ when we picked them up and roughly half of them we were doing business with,” Roshitsh said.

Going forward, Dude is also going to be pushing more into the energy space with government buildings, a natural extension of its facilities asset management work. Using energy data, utility bill analysis and other approaches, Roshitsh said the company can save local governments something like 15 to 25 percent on their energy bills.

“A lot of these buildings have thermostats that fight each other,” he said. “So you’re in a room and you’ve got a thermostat set to 74 and your colleague has it at 70, and the HVACs start fighting each other.”

The company is also using machine learning to identify buildings with roofs that have a high likelihood of structural problems that will soon require major work.

“[A customer can] get the right maintenance done, preventing a rip-and-replace, saving tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars when you think about the state,” he said. “It’s not sexy, but it’s vital.”

Dude Solutions is part of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus' portfolio, and it has acquired a couple other companies since joining Warburg Pincus in 2014.

Ben Miller is the associate editor of data and business for Government Technology. His reporting experience includes breaking news, business, community features and technical subjects. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lives in Sacramento, Calif.