The deal is a Garden State team-up — both companies are based in New Jersey and have focused their business heavily there.
It also brings together SDL’s citizen engagement tools with GovSites’ portals.
“The addition of GovSites will allow us to deliver a more personalized municipal experience for residents,” said SDL President Brian Flood in a press release. “In addition to the SDL Portal and SDL Citizen app, residents will now be able to submit applications, request inspections, report issues and view town alerts directly on their town’s website. Any resident actions will sync back to the other SDL platforms.”
On top of those apps, SDL’s software suite also includes tools for licensing pets, handling open records requests and managing zoning applications.
While SDL is more than 20 years old and has many customers, GovSites is younger. The company was founded in 2016, and a website code search for the company’s name yielded 29 results.
The merger, however, follows a larger trend in gov tech of consolidation among website builders. Last year, Granicus acquired the public sector website provider Vision Internet. Meanwhile CivicPlus, one of the largest municipal website makers, has purchased several other companies in recent years.
In the age of digital government, such deals provide linkages between websites and services. ProudCity, being a smaller and younger web platform, leans more on its open source platform and integrations to give customers means to fold additional services into their websites.
“Municipal websites have historically been a one-way street where municipalities push information out to their residents, but the residents are unable to take action or respond back,” GovSites Founder John Flanagan said in the statement. “Spatial Data Logic shares our vision to provide municipalities with a truly personalized and two-way website experience for residents. We look forward to being able to offer and evolve our websites to meet the growing needs of our clients and their communities.”