The price tag attached to the five-year contract awarded to Red Rock Consulting, a DXC Technology subsidiary, for the new enterprise resource planning (ERP) software being deployed at TAFE NSW has been pegged at $83.2 million.
The contract period kicked off on 19 September and is set to extend until 30 November 2023.
According to NSW Government tender documents, the contract is for the delivery and management a fit-for-purpose service to effectively and efficiently manage the enquiries and recruitment of students and customers, throughout the student life cycle and to manage the associated revenue and alumni of the tertiary education provider.
The $83.2 million is to cover the implementation and services costs for the five-year period, not including optional extensions.
Although Red Rock was the selected firm for the services, there are also a number of sub-contractors included in the contract terms. These are Oracle Australia, Marketing Decisions, Arinum Solutions, Foild and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The deal sees Red Rock provide TAFE NSW with a student management solution called "Red Campus”, managed and delivered on an as-a-service basis.
The DXC Technology Oracle partner is also in charge of providing end-to-end management of the student management solution including application, platform, operating system and cloud management services.
The system being replaced by Red Rock, was initially provided by UK-based Tribal, which was selected in 2011 to implement its ebs student management system to TAFE NSW under the learning management and business reform (LBMR).
However, TAFE faced several issues that were blamed on the Tribal system, including delays in student enrolments and inaccuracies in student finances.
At the time, TAFE and Tribal issued a joint clarification claiming those issues were “due to a host of issues related to non-integration with the third party fee calculator, staff training compliance, data migration scope and quality of legacy data”.
TAFE NSW's acting CIO at the time, Mark Champion, said: “TAFE NSW is currently assessing a range of opportunities to modernise our business and better meet the ever-changing needs of our students and industry partners. Reviewing the current LMBR system, specifically our student management services, is just one of these opportunities.
“We have been well supported by Tribal Group throughout the review process, and expect to continue our working relationship as we explore TAFE NSW’s future needs and requirements,” he said.
Red Rock's lucrative deal with TAFE NSW comes roughly eight months after Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu was handed a $9.14 million, multi-year contract by TAFE NSW for the provision of data centre services.
That deal, which also involved the provision of several Oracle cloud solutions, was set to see Deloitte provide TAFE NSW with solutions and services to manage its process of identity management through the provision of software-as-a-service solution known as the TAFE Hub.
The contract also saw Deloitte charged with installing the new infrastructure in the Government Data Centres (GovDC) sites at Silverwater and Unanderra, which are operated by Metronode, with all the hosting infrastructure, hardware, related software, networking, backbone, data centre premises, tools and facilities provided by the NSW Government through GovDC.
Among the solutions delivered by Deloitte as part of the arrangement was Oracle Integration Cloud Services, Oracle Java Cloud Services and Oracle Enterprise Identity Services Suite (EISS), the latter to be deployed on two Oracle cloud machines at Silverwater and Unanderra.
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