At first I thought it was an outrageous cost for a payroll system, but according to the article, the UW system has 60,000 employees over 27 campuses. For those

At first I thought it was an outrageous cost for a payroll system, but according to the article, the UW system has 60,000 employees over 27 campuses. For those 60k employees, getting paid is a VERY IMPORTANT deal... there can't be any mistakes in this scale. (A single tiny mistake will propegate it self 60000 times and that won't be fun to fix). Plus their last system lasted ~35 years (since 1975), so I am guessing their planning a equally long lasting system.