Finance seeks provision of SAP Commonwealth HANA Enterprise Cloud

March 27, 2020

The Department of Finance is seeking a vendor to provision the Commonwealth HANA Enterprise Cloud.

The HANA Enterprise Cloud is touted by SAP as a fully scalable and secure cloud service that provides production availability spanning the entire application and infrastructure stack.

In a request for tender (RFT), the department explained that it maintains an SAP Business Suite on a HANA environment to support the SAP solution landscapes for a number of Australian government agencies.

The SAP environment is currently provided through SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud Services.

Finance said it is seeking to test the market for this service, with the service to be fully operational no later than 30 March 2021.

“The current service provides SAP at a Platform as a Service level including basis support for SAP Business Suite and HANA databases. Finance will continue to own and have responsibility for SAP licenses and support,” it wrote.

In the RFT, Finance is asking prospective suppliers to describe how its cloud hosting platform is scalable and would enable and support Finance’s system capability and capacity on a 24×7 basis.

The tenderer should also boast a cloud infrastructure that is tailored to run SAP applications.

Finance expects the number of Australian government agencies it supports using the SAP HANA environment to significantly increase during the term of the contract, following its recent decision to provide a whole-of-government enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.

Finance earlier this month called for panellists to provide the Australian government’s new common ERP system, GovERP, with “complementary capabilities”.

The SAP S/4 HANA platform aims to “consolidate, standardise, and automate the delivery of core transactional corporate services across non-corporate Commonwealth entities through designated Hubs and introduce common and coordinated investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems across the hubs”.

There are currently six hubs that deliver payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable, credit card management, and ledger management. Around 30 organisations are already receiving one or more services through a hub, the Department of Finance said.

Each hub currently delivers these services using their existing ERP systems. However, going forward, the government anticipates each hub would coordinate their investment which it hopes will reduce the number of ERP systems that are separately managed and maintained.

Finance is working with the hubs to undertake discovery work that would test the feasibility of the SAP-based hubs being moved to a common ERP instance.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, Finance will be conducting a virtual industry briefing for interested parties. Submissions close 20 April 2020.

RELATED COVERAGE

Panel sought for Australia’s government-wide SAP S/4 HANA ERP platform

The Department of Finance is seeking a panel of suppliers to provide GovERP ‘complementary capabilities’.

IBM, Telstra, Boeing among largest tech suppliers to Australian government

Over the 10 years through 2018-19, contracts to the value of AU$490.8 billion were procured publicly by the federal government.

Australian government is currently juggling 62 high-cost IT projects

Information revealed to ZDNet under freedom of information has shown all of them are valued at over AU$10 million, and one was contracted to Telstra back in 2013.

Government-wide SAP deal expected to save IT coin

The enterprise technology firm will continue to provide the Australian government with products and services where appropriate, but under a new whole-of-government agreement expected to save IT procurement costs.

Article source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/finance-seeks-provision-of-sap-commonwealth-hana-enterprise-cloud/#ftag=RSSbaffb68