Techwire reports on IBM’s award of a $12 million contract for 21st Century Payroll Project deployment and training for the new SAP based system. Not sure if it will make up for IBM’s failure to even have their FI$CAL final bid opened. Apparently, just CGI and Accenture made that final evaluation. In a another somewhat surprising development, TLTV has learned that CGI actually won the technical evaluation; however, their proposed cost was some $60 million higher than the Accenture/Oracle team’s $213 million proposal. That margin more than made up for the technical discrepancy in terms of evaluation scores between the two bids, and Accenture was the winner.

Ironically, a similar development occurred during the procurement for 21st Century Project software in 2005 when to everyone’s surprise including SAP, little Lawson Software won the technical evaluation but like CGI with FI$CAL, lost due to the much cheaper SAP cost proposal.

As to whether Accenture’s $213 million figure will hold up over the project’s five year deployment of a new enterprise financial system for the State of California, I have my sincere doubts, and to back that up I will take all bets from those who disagree with me.

Here’s more from the Techwire story:

The 21st Century Project awarded a $12 million Deployment and Transition contract with IBM Corporation, which will provide staff to help support state departments switching to the new MyCalPays system, the State Controller’s office confirmed this week.

The contract states that IBM will provide 3 senior deployment liaisons and 32 liaisons to departments throughout the state as specified in the contract, which dates through September, 2013, according to the controller’s office.

“IBM will be focusing on the deployment of the system to ensure than the more than 160 departments in the state are ready and able to transition to the MyCalPays application,” said Garin Casaleggio, deputy communications director for the State Controller’s Office.

The 21st Century Project, an effort within the State Controller’s office to replace legacy payroll systems with a single system for all state employees, will roll out with MyCalPays, the new payroll system, for 1,300 employees in the Controller’s office in June, according to Casaleggio.