CACI, Oracle to build federal procurement tool

CACI International Inc. and Oracle Corp. are developing a contract life cycle management solution to help federal agencies write, execute and manage procurement contracts that comply with the Federal Acquisition Regulation, Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement and other government mandates.

The two companies announced the agreement last week at the Oracle Federal Forum in Washington.

With the government moving toward commercial procurement solutions and enterprise resource planning tools, "we decided that the best way for us to service the market is to combine our functional knowledge with Oracle's continued investment in bringing the best products to the marketplace, help them build that out and then go to market together around the systems integration work," said Gil Guarino, executive vice president of transformation solutions at CACI.

"What we're going to help them do is build out their contract management module, what they call Oracle Advanced Procurement," Guarino added. "We're taking their commercial e-business suite and helping them put the [defense and civilian acquisition regulation] capabilities into it."

Oracle will use CACI's expertise in designing and implementing contract management systems for the Defense Department and civilian agencies to upgrade its commercial e-business suite. The result will be a full set of government procurement capabilities for life cycle management, Guarino said.

"Oracle as a company has never really attacked that space with an offering, and we've been in that space for 30 years," he said.

"We're seeing that federal agencies, especially the Defense Department, want integrated packages because they don't want to be dealing with integration across functional boundaries," Guarino said. "So an ERP provider, if they bring the full spectrum of capabilities to the table, eliminates for the federal customer the necessity to go do a separate procurement module."

The enhanced suite is expected to support simplified and complex acquisitions and will be integrated into Oracle's procurement and financial management applications. The goal is to create a procure-to-pay process that meets government compliance mandates and assists in federal contract management, company officials said at the forum.

CACI, of Arlington, Va., ranks No. 17 on Washington Technology's 2008 Top 100 list of the largest federal government prime contractors.