Consider this scenario, a medium scale organization wants to move to a new ERP system partially and still retain an essential piece of its legacy. A couple of years ago this scenario would have meant a project roll-out to migrate to a new system and part ways with the legacy completely. This would have meant larger implementation cost and increased timelines.

Oracle solved this nightmare organizations had to go through by introducing this concept of coexistence. Existing ERP system and Oracle Fusion applications could share the landscape and harmoniously coexist and deliver business value. This concept not only reduces IT investments but also enables organizations to build an implementation road-map to adopt Oracle Fusion in incremental steps without going through a major overhaul.

Oracle focused its coexistence capabilities more on Human Capital management (HCM). There were lot of early adopters who chose to move to Oracle Fusion Talent Management and yet retain their core HRIS in a legacy ERP, predominantly Oracle E-Business Suite HRMS.

If you evaluate from a customer’s perspective, it really makes sense to retain their existing ERP and just adopt Oracle Fusion Talent Management. This will harness the power of cloud platform and leverage the essentials like talent review, dashboard reporting, social networking, and predictive analysis.

However, there are other coexistence models defined by Oracle beyond HCM for other products. A classic example to support this is Oracle’s financial applications (Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft Financial Management, etc.). A common coexistence scenario is to implement Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub with an existing Oracle Applications solution. There could be other business drivers for implementing a coexistence model like Oracle Fusion does not have a manufacturing module. Hence, a typical scenario could be implementing Oracle Fusion HCM and Oracle Fusion Financials and still retaining the Oracle E-business suite manufacturing module.

As Oracle Fusion applications provide additional functionalities which the customers current ERP might not be capable of, a coexistence solution plays a key role in bridging the gap.

To conclude, coexistence made the Oracle Fusion applications adoption road map a fairly easier task and made it a win-win deal for customers. They can save costs and yet get a best-in-class system. In the process, Oracle succeeds in giving the customer a flavor of its cutting edge solution. The outcome is incremental adoption of other modules one after the other.

The fact still remains that Oracle Fusion has best-in-class embedded analytics and key features that make it stand tall in a sea of cloud applications.