update Department of Defence officials have rejected Oracle's PeopleSoft pitch for its human resources (HR) upgrade and asked that it resubmit a tender against rival SAP.
Defence will pit the two software giants against each other after it decided to reissue its request for tender for its Personnel Management Key Solution (PMKeyS) upgrade project. PMKeyS is the core HR system for Defence and manages payments to around 20,000 staff.
Oracle's PeopleSoft pitch was ruled out following IBM and EDS' withdrawal from the tender process, according to Defence's head of information systems division, Peter Lambert.
"We needed to ensure industry could deliver a value for money solution within a required budget and schedule. The response of Oracle was non-compliant with conditions of tender that would have allowed us to ascertain these outcomes," he said in a statement last Friday.
"At this stage we intend to limit the solutions to our existing suite of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Of those, only Oracle Peoplesoft and SAP have widely utilised and world leading HRM capabilities."
A Defence spokesperson refused to give an approximate value for the contract, and said this would be dependent on the quality of tenders received.