According to TheRegister.com, California’s FI$Cal (Financial Information System for California) project, first proposed in 2005, took a staggering 16 years to fully deploy its final functionality by 2021. The system, built on Oracle’s PeopleSoft and Hyperion platforms, now supports roughly 16,000 users across 151 state departments, processing $453 billion in spending annually while handling over $2.9 trillion in banking transactions. Despite being declared complete by the legislature in 2022, several major departments, including the Department of Justice and Caltrans, are still slated to onboard by 2028. The project’s core challenge now is a looming migration, as Oracle’s long-term support for the on-premises PeopleSoft software, whose last major release was in 2013, is set to end in 2035. This leaves California and thousands of other public-sector entities across the U.S. facing a massive, complex, and expensive transition to modern cloud-based systems.
The Real Work Is Just Beginning
So, California “finished” its epic IT project. Here’s the thing: in enterprise software, especially government tech, “finished” is a relative term. The state just spent nearly two decades getting everyone onto a unified platform, which is a herculean achievement. But now the platform itself is aging. It’s like finally assembling a massive, intricate model ship, only to realize the hull is made of a material that’s starting to degrade. The next phase—figuring out how to move this behemoth to the cloud without sinking it—might be just as hard. Forrester analyst Akshara Naik Lopez nails it: the real question for these agencies is whether modern SaaS vendors can handle their wildly complex, customized needs “out of the box.” The answer is probably “no,” which means another marathon of configuration and compromise lies ahead.
The PeopleSoft Paradox
This situation highlights a huge paradox in public-sector IT. Oracle’s PeopleSoft was the gold standard for state and local governments in the early 2000s. Agencies, including California, layered on countless customizations to fit their unique rules and processes. That made the system work for them, but it also created a massive technical debt trap. Now, as Oracle focuses on its Fusion SaaS suite, they’re stuck. The support deadline of 2035 seems far off, but for a project that took 16 years to implement? That’s basically tomorrow. As Spinnaker Support’s Iain Saunderson notes, no one is buying new PeopleSoft installations anymore. The user base is slowly dwindling, and while you don’t have to act today, you absolutely need a plan. The clock is ticking, and it’s a very slow, expensive clock.
A Fork in the Cloud Road
So what are the options? Lopez outlines two paths, and neither is a walk in the park. The first is the full SaaS migration—to something like Oracle Fusion, Workday, or another platform. This promises modern features and less infrastructure hassle, but requires brutally untangling all those old customizations. The second path is a “lift and shift,” moving the existing PeopleSoft application to a hyperscaler cloud like AWS or Azure. This avoids a full software rewrite and lets you add some modern AI automation on top, but you’re still maintaining a legacy application. It’s just now in someone else’s data center. California’s stated “cloud-first” policy and its phased migration suggest they’re eyeing this hybrid approach first. Basically, they’re trying to buy time and avoid another multi-billion dollar, multi-decade project right away. Can you blame them?
Why This Matters to Everyone
Look, this isn’t just a California problem or a government problem. It’s a textbook case of legacy modernization that every large organization faces. The scale is just more dramatic. When you’re dealing with systems that manage trillions of dollars, the cost of failure isn’t a lost sale—it’s people not getting paid or critical services freezing up. The Register points out that thousands of SLED (State, Local, and Education) entities are in the same boat, and RFPs are starting to fly. The next decade will be a giant, messy, and incredibly costly wave of public-sector IT migrations. For taxpayers, it means more billions spent on tech. For vendors and systems integrators, it’s a potential gold rush. And for the IT teams in the trenches? It means their career-defining project is finally over, only to be immediately replaced by another one. The work of modernizing foundational systems, whether it’s software for a state budget or the industrial panel PCs running a factory floor, is never truly done. The goalposts just keep moving.
