In times of economic uncertainty and rapid technological change, companies tend to become more conservative about where they place their bets.
AI is reshaping the software landscape. Entire categories of applications are being questioned. Innovation budgets are scrutinized. Experimental projects are asked to justify their ROI faster than ever.
And yet, in the middle of all this uncertainty, one software category keeps attracting sustained investment: ERP.
According to Grand View Research, the global ERP software market was valued at USD 64.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach over USD 123 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 12%.
That is not a market preparing for decline. It is a market accelerating.
When uncertainty rises, companies do not usually double down on experimentation. They prioritize systems with direct, measurable impact on core operations. And few systems have a more immediate financial and operational impact than ERP.
Which raises an uncomfortable but important question:
If modernizing an ERP is one of the most complex, risky, and disruptive initiatives an organization can take on, why do companies still choose to do it?
ERP in an Age of Uncertainty
We are not living in stable times.
Economic volatility, geopolitical tension, regulatory pressure, fragile supply chains, and now AI-driven disruption have turned uncertainty into a permanent condition rather than a temporary phase.
When uncertainty rises, companies rarely double down on experimental technology. Instead, they become more selective. They prioritize systems with direct, measurable impact on core operations, systems where failure is not an inconvenience but a financial event.
This is where ERP stands apart from much of the SaaS ecosystem.
While parts of SaaS show signs of erosion, dashboards, reporting tools, and narrow point solutions are increasingly being replaced by AI-built alternatives created directly by internal teams.
ERP, on the other hand, behaves very differently. When ERP fails, the entire business stops. We are talking about systems that are highly customized, deeply embedded in operations, and carry a level of complexity that makes them impossible to replicate simply by using AI to bypass the vendor altogether.
Revenue recognition, inventory valuation, payroll, compliance, and financial reporting. These are not areas where organizations experiment lightly, especially when margins are under pressure.
This helps explain why the ERP market continues to grow even as other software categories are questioned. According to Grand View Research, the global ERP market is projected to grow at a double-digit compound annual growth rate through 2030.
Legacy Oracle ERP: Why Many Organizations Stay Put
A large number of organizations continue to run legacy Oracle ERP systems such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards.
Many of them are not stuck. They are stable. In some cases, they are perfectly satisfied.
That is not irrational.
Legacy Oracle ERP systems offer very real advantages. They have been battle-tested over years, sometimes decades, of production use. They are deeply customized to reflect specific business processes. The teams running them know their behavior, their quirks, and their failure modes. Much of the initial investment has already been amortized. And Oracle provides long-term support that, in some cases, extends well into the 2030s.
From a risk perspective, staying put often looks like the safest option.
These systems have survived audits, reorganizations, acquisitions, regulatory changes, and economic cycles. They already carry the scars of real-world operations.
So if the system works and it is supported, why touch it at all?
The Limits of Staying on Legacy
The problem with legacy ERP is rarely that it stops working. The problem is that it becomes harder to change without paying an increasing price.
Over time, custom logic accumulates and becomes harder to untangle. Integrations grow more brittle and expensive to maintain. Changes take longer and require skills that are becoming scarcer. User experience lags behind modern expectations. Reporting and analytics rely on increasingly complex workarounds layered on top of aging foundations.
None of this forces an immediate decision. But it quietly shifts the balance.
What once felt stable starts to feel fragile to change.
When Does Modernization Actually Make Sense?
Another factor that often shifts the decision has less to do with ERP itself and more with the broader infrastructure agenda.
For many organizations, moving to Fusion becomes part of a wider effort to reduce or close in-house data centers. ERP is rarely the first system to move, but it is often one of the last and most symbolic ones. When leadership commits to exiting on-prem infrastructure, keeping a mission-critical ERP behind starts to feel inconsistent with the direction of travel.
At the same time, the functional gap keeps widening. Fusion has been evolving for more than a decade, while legacy ERP platforms see fewer enhancements and a gradual slowdown in innovation. The move toward Redwood, with its redesigned user experience and growing conversational AI capabilities, accelerates that divergence. Over time, the question stops being whether ERP still works and becomes whether it can realistically keep up with how the business wants to operate.
Cost, however, remains the great counterweight.
For many companies, the price tag of a full Cloud ERP implementation is measured in millions, with timelines stretching across years. Organizations that have been running stable on-prem systems for decades are rarely budgeting for that kind of disruption. In those cases, the decision is not driven by promised benefits, but by economics and pressure. As long as the legacy system is paid for, compliant, and supported, no moment feels like a good moment to switch.
This is why migration decisions are often delayed until something external forces the issue. A strategic push to shut down data centers. A compliance requirement. A growing mismatch between business needs and what the legacy platform can reasonably deliver. Or a point where the cost of standing still starts to rival the cost of moving.
The Talent Problem Few Organizations Plan For
Another factor quietly pushing modernization decisions is talent.
Legacy Oracle ERP skills are becoming harder to find and harder to retain. Many of the professionals who built and stabilized these systems over the last two decades are no longer on the market. Some are deeply embedded in a small number of organizations, effectively irreplaceable. Others have retired, or deliberately shifted their careers toward more modern stacks where demand, mobility, and long-term prospects are stronger.
What remains is a shrinking pool of specialists, often commanding premium rates, extended overtime, or long-term consulting contracts just to keep the system running smoothly. Over time, this changes the cost equation because maintaining operational stability becomes increasingly dependent on a few individuals.
For leadership, this creates a different kind of risk:
What happens if key people leave? How sustainable is a platform that only a handful of experts truly understand? At some point, the cost of preserving institutional knowledge begins to rival the cost of change.
What Oracle Fusion Changes and What It Does Not
Oracle Fusion represents a fundamentally different operating model.
It moves ERP into a cloud-delivered, continuously updated environment, with a stronger emphasis on configuration over customization, tighter integration capabilities, and a user experience designed for modern workflows. It also provides a foundation that aligns more naturally with contemporary analytics and AI use cases.
But these changes come with important architectural and economic implications.
Legacy ERP environments were largely CapEx-driven. Infrastructure, licenses, custom development, and long implementation cycles concentrated costs upfront. Once stabilized, many organizations operated these systems for years with relatively predictable operating expenses.
Fusion shifts that balance toward OpEx.
Subscription fees, integration services, security, compliance, and continuous change management become recurring costs. While infrastructure ownership decreases, ongoing operational spending becomes a permanent feature of the ERP landscape.
This shift has architectural consequences:
In a CapEx heavy model, customization often absorbed complexity. In an OpEx driven model, complexity compounds cost. Poorly designed processes, fragmented integrations, and weak data governance show up not as technical debt, but as recurring expense.
Fusion also assumes that ERP sits at the center of a broader cloud architecture. APIs, integration platforms, identity management, data pipelines, and analytics layers move from optional to essential. Organizations that underestimate this often discover that the ERP subscription itself represents only a portion of the total cost of ownership.
It is equally important to be clear about what Fusion does not do.
It does not fix broken business processes. It does not clean bad data automatically. It does not eliminate organizational complexity. It does not remove the need for governance. And it certainly does not make ERP risk-free.
That is why you need certified technical and functional consultants involved from the strategy phase through implementation, so the move to Fusion does not become a painfully long and disruptive process.
The Real Difficulty of Modernizing ERP
The real difficulty lies in several overlapping layers.
Customization is often the first. Years of custom code encode business logic that is essential but poorly documented. Removing or rethinking it requires decisions the organization may have avoided for a long time.
Data is another. ERP data is voluminous, sensitive, and uneven in quality. Historical inconsistencies, implicit rules, and hidden dependencies make data migration one of the most underestimated challenges in any modernization effort.
Then there are people and habits. Users are not just trained on the system. They are adapted to it. Much of the knowledge required to operate ERP lives in experience rather than documentation. Resistance is rarely emotional. It is operational.
Operational risk ties everything together. ERP is the system of record. Any misalignment shows up immediately in cash flow, compliance, and reporting. Go live is not the finish line. It is the moment when the system meets the full weight of day-to-day operations.
Finally, governance and timing shape every decision: leadership changes, budget cycles, regulatory events, and strategic shifts all influence when and how it happens.
Conclusion: If it works, why touch it?
Most ERP modernization decisions do not start with a technical failure.
They start with pressure.
Pressure shows up quietly at first. Overtime increases. Consultants become permanent fixtures. Key people turn into single points of failure. Finding experienced talent gets harder and more expensive. What once felt stable starts to demand constant attention just to stay that way.
Then something shifts the equation.
An acquisition forces standardization. An audit exposes fragility that lived under the surface. Leadership changes and brings a different risk appetite. Or the IT team reaches a point where keeping the system running requires more effort than leadership is comfortable sustaining.
In some cases, the push comes from the top. Board-level conversations, vendor pressure, or commercial incentives accelerate decisions before teams feel fully ready. In others, it comes from the bottom, when operational pain becomes impossible to ignore.
Rarely is there a single trigger. More often, it is the accumulation of small signals that makes staying put feel less conservative than change.
For leaders, the real question is not whether legacy ERP still works. It is whether the organization is comfortable carrying the operational, talent, and continuity risks that come with keeping it exactly as it is.
A note on choosing the right path
At Inclusion Cloud, we see both sides of this decision.
For some organizations, the smartest move is to stay on their current Oracle ERP and optimize what already works. For others, moving to Oracle Fusion is the right step to regain control, simplify operations, and reduce long-term risk.
What matters is having the right expertise for whichever path you choose.
With certified technical and functional consultants across both legacy Oracle modules and modern Oracle Cloud platforms, we help organizations design and execute the approach that fits their reality. And through inMOVE™ by Inclusion Cloud, our AI-powered recruiting engine, with access to over one million candidates, we can identify and deploy the right specialist for your project in as little as 72 hours. Contact us!
