Workday has beaten SAP and Oracle to a £144 million government ERP deal that will standardise systems in the cloud across nine departments.
ERP vendor Workday will take £64 million of the contract and systems integrator Cognizant £81 million under the so-called “Matrix Programme.”
The programme will join the ERP systems of the Cabinet Office, HM Treasury, Education (DfE), Health (DHSC) and several other departments.
Ultimately it will result in new finance and HR systems for 48,000 users.
What is the Matrix Programme in HMG?
It is one of several ambitious cross-departmental shared services efforts (including ERP standardisation) out to market, including the larger £1 billion Synergy programme that will bring together software for 250,000 users across the DWP, the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and Defra.
The Unity Programme meanwhile, which went to market in December 2023, does a similar thing (ERP + SI) for HMRC, Transport, and others.
The Ministry of Defence has also been wrangling with ERP modernisation.
The £144 million contract detailed for the Matrix Programme is, at this stage, significantly lower than the £215 million cited in an initial tender.
That had suggested up to 29 government entitites could be onboarded. The contract notice awarding the deal to Workday and Cognizant, however, said that whilst "there is potential for additional Arms Lengths Bodies to onboard, however each will be assessed on a individual basis and subject to government principles around the management of public money..."
£144m deal for SaaS vendor + SI
The Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) is leading the Matrix Programme and announced the winners of the £144,330,703 deal in a contract notice on October 4, after going to market in July 2023.
The government inked the contracts after launching a "bundled procurement" looking for a SaaS vendor and a Systems Integrator (SI).
This means that both these solutions were procured through a single process to "work together in partnership from the outset" by "jointly proposing a cohesive solution and delivery approach".
he programme will see Cognizant bring together 15 instances of nine different software solutions (some on-premises, some on-cloud) across nine primary departments and swap 10 service providers “varying in maturity, service provision and position” for a single SaaS platform
Four companies applied for the tender, and the contract was signed on September 6, 2024, following a competitive procedure, a notice showed.
READ MORE: UK gov pledges to rip out legacy IT and eject consultants
The Matrix Programme brings together departments with on-premises ERP footprints and those already running their systems in the cloud.
These "non-cloud users" are the Cabinet Office, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Department for Business and Trade (DBT). The known cloud users are the Attorney General's Office (AGO), Department for Education (DfE), Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and HM Treasury (HMT).
"The Matrix Programme, with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology acting as the lead… has designed, developed, and procured new technology and capabilities that are required to help modernise the Departments 'back office' systems” said HMG: “It will deliver a high quality… system and support service to help streamline the transactions and activities that underpin the way Departments are run."
Extra expenses during the contract may include licence costs, core fees, project accounting, recruitment, inventory management, AMS (application management services) support, and future ALB (application load balancer) onboardings a contract notice revealed this month.
Gartner cited Workday as the market share leader for worldwide SaaS ERP revenue in 2023. It reported $1.9 billion in subscription revenues for its last reported quarter. Its customers include Barclays, Nissan, Target.
Earlier this year, a judge in California ruled that Workday must face a class action lawsuit over allegations its AI job application software "bakes in... biases" – claims the company denies and will fight in court.
