ERPA makes the old systems move.

A month after Boston moved its PeopleSoft systems to Amazon Web Services, the old mainframe had a major outage. In ERPA’s account, the city’s migrated operations carried on. It is an unusually tidy illustration of an untidy business: deciding which parts of an institution’s technology to keep, which to move, and who will answer when something stops working.

ERPA occupies that space between buying software and getting dependable work out of it. Founded in 1999, the company combines consulting, cloud hosting, managed services and staffing. A university can ask it to maintain PeopleSoft. An employer can hire it to untangle Workday integrations. An organization moving to AWS can buy migration help and the continuing care afterward. The interesting unit of value is the functioning institution.

The outage that missed Boston

Boston’s problem had accumulated in layers. PeopleSoft HR and finance applications depended on an older mainframe and DB2 databases. Aging application versions constrained functionality; maintenance and security patching were difficult. ERPA had supported the city’s PeopleSoft applications since 2013, but the modernization still went through competitive procurement.

The resulting project moved the stack to AWS, updated application components and paired the infrastructure with managed services. ERPA also reports that more than 20 contracts became one agreement. That detail deserves attention. A technology estate includes the paperwork, handoffs and separate responsibilities that surround the machines. Consolidating those arrangements can matter to the people trying to operate it.

Keep the application. Change its conditions.

At Alabama State University, the limitations were painfully ordinary: outages, aging infrastructure and PeopleSoft applications that needed updating. Student registration and employee administration depended on them. The university had a small IT team and a constrained budget. The useful question was whether the existing investment could do more if its surroundings improved.

The AWS customer account describes ERPA moving the environment onto AWS, updating PeopleSoft and using its ActiveGenie orchestration tooling. The university also engaged ERPA to manage infrastructure, applications and databases. AWS reports that the approach avoided substantial capital expenditure. That is a financing distinction as well as a technical one: ongoing cloud operations replace some of the burden of owning hardware.

ActiveGenie supplies repeatable machinery for this work. ERPA describes automated migration processes, scheduled backups, environment start-and-stop controls, monitoring dashboards and resource scaling. These are practical chores with consequences. The appeal is doing them consistently, while leaving specialists available for the exceptions that automation cannot settle.

A familiar name on the other end

Workday introduces a related problem. Launching an HR or finance platform does not eliminate release preparation, reporting changes, security configuration or integration troubleshooting. ERPA’s application managed services cover those jobs with named consultants who learn a customer’s environment. Continuity is an explicit part of the offer.

On ERPA’s Workday AMS page, Donna Matteucci describes the appeal in unusually concrete terms:

“they provided the same people who knew our system inside and out.”

Donna Matteucci / customer testimony published by ERPA

There is an economic argument hiding in that sentence. Every new consultant needs context. A recurring team can spend less of the engagement rediscovering how the customer works. ERPA’s MSCI case makes the complementary point: outside expertise can help a capable internal team remain self-sufficient. Support is most useful when it leaves knowledge behind.

The consultant becomes the customer

ERPA has encountered the same problem internally. As its business expanded across geographies and business units, disconnected systems made a coherent financial picture difficult. A Workday customer story dates ERPA’s consolidation onto the platform to 2019. HR, finance, payroll and time tracking came together.

The account reports more than 30% improvement in invoicing accuracy, with consultant time flowing into finance and engagement managers approving it. ERPA also used Workday Extend to forecast customer projects three years ahead. These are vendor-published results, rather than an independent benchmark, but they reveal a useful priority: a consultancy needs its own hours, commitments and bills to agree.

A smaller front door to Workday

In September 2025, ERPA announced OPTIMA, a Workday deployment methodology for smaller education and public-sector organizations. The launch announcement describes fixed deployment costs, a prescriptive approach, named resources and support beyond go-live. The proposition addresses an awkward mismatch: institutions can need enterprise systems without having enterprise-sized implementation teams.

The price needs to be understood through scope. ERPA’s AWS Marketplace offering uses custom private offers based on requirements and eligibility. A buyer should price migration, integrations, internal staff time and continuing support together. A fixed deployment price is useful only when the organization understands which work it includes and which changes trigger another discussion.

Buy the years after launch

ERPA sits among enterprise implementation firms and managed-service specialists, with Workday, AWS and Oracle relationships anchoring its practice. Its distinction is the combination of application knowledge, cloud operations, proprietary automation and ongoing delivery. A buyer choosing among systems integrators should test how that combination fits the actual workload.

The copyable lesson is to locate the bottleneck before purchasing the remedy. Infrastructure work can preserve an application that still serves the organization. It cannot, by itself, fix a confused approval process. Prescriptive deployments also need requirements that fit their scope. Ask who owns the release calendar, who handles an incident, and who remembers the decisions six months later. The answers describe the service you will actually live with.