Oracle Awarded $395.8 Million Contract for Federal HR Platform

The Trump administration has awarded Oracle a massive contract to build a unified, government-wide human resources platform. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which acts as the federal government's central HR department, selected the tech giant for the 10-year, $395.8 million “Federal HR 2.0” contract. According to reports by news agency Reuters and local publication Washington Technology, Oracle, whose executive chairman Larry Ellison is a prominent Trump supporter and member of the president’s science and technology council, beat out heavy competition for the deal. The cloud-based platform will be tasked with managing human resource functions for more than two million federal employees. The tech giant faced off against rival software and consulting heavyweights, including Workday, IBM, SAP, and Economic Systems Inc.

Arranging 100 software systems into one

The reports said that currently, the US government's human resources infrastructure is a fragmented mess, with more than 100 individual HR systems operating independently across different federal agencies. Federal HR 2.0 is OPM’s attempt to wrangle all of those disconnected platforms into a single, centralised database. According to OPM Director Scott Kupor, Oracle’s new cloud software will replace these legacy agency-by-agency systems with the goal is to establish a data-driven federal HR ecosystem that standardizes employee management. The firm-fixed-price contract outlines a massive list of requirements that Oracle must manage. The new platform will handle a bunch of things for the Trump administration. These include core HR and personnel action processing; payroll and benefits integration; time, attendance and record tracking; workforce analytics alongside self-service portals for employees and managers; and audit-ready financial and operational reporting. As the system deals with sensitive government personnel data, Oracle is trusted to ensure that the platform complies with stringent federal cybersecurity standards, including FISMA and FedRAMP, while remaining fully interoperable with existing government IT systems. Interestingly, OPM's choice to go with Oracle is a play for continuity. Much of the government’s current HR operations run on PeopleSoft – a software suite that Oracle acquired back in 2005. Oracle recently extended its official support and security patches for PeopleSoft through 2037, easing the data migration pathway for federal technicians.