IBM and Oracle to support 280,000 users after winning mega ERP govt tech contract
IBM and Oracle have won a competition to supply an ERP upgrade to a group of UK central government departments in a deal worth £711 million ($950 million).
The UK government has signed the tech giants to provide ERP and systems integration services for a massive upgrade across four major Whitehall departments and their arm's-length bodies, supporting around 280,000 employees.
In the graveyard of troubled IT projects, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) leads the Synergy Programme, which will see it and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Home Office transferred to one ERP and HR system with a common set of processes.
Awarding the tech side of the project to Oracle and IBM, the DWP said it would "procure and adopt a cloud-based service leveraging the capabilities offered by a Software as-a-Service (SaaS) ERP platform and associated technologies."
"The prime driver of the Synergy Programme is to drive significant business transformation across the… departments," it said.
