What is our primary use case?
This can be an Oracle-agnostic tool; it does not have to be Oracle-specific; it can integrate any other tools as well. However, it is very useful for integrating other Oracle applications.
It can easily integrate Oracle Financial Suite, Oracle CPQ, and any other Oracle products, for example. When working with Oracle, this is the unmistakable integration tool we recommend.
This is also an autonomous one, self-service, which is fantastic. If you need more messaging capacity, you can add it on a self-service page in the public cloud. It does a variety of market standard adapters, such as SAP, Google, and Facebook, as well as DocuSign.
How has it helped my organization?
Coupa is a purchasing system that connects purchase invoices to our Oracle payables module. You may not know anything about Coupa, but if you have a Coupa adapter connection, you can drag and drop, and then you can simply get the Coupa connection. It will automatically connect to Coupa and pull data from it.
Because it can easily connect to Oracle natively, it connects to Oracle and pushes data into Oracle. This is one of your use cases. You can also use Concur, which is an expensive product.
Another option is to transfer expense invoices from the Concur system to the Oracle payables model. It's the same thing back and forth; you can even push data from Oracle to Coupa if you need to send an acknowledgment.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features of this solution are the SFTP adapters, file adapters, and risk adapters, that we use in everyday projects.
What needs improvement?
In terms of improvement, debugging and error handling, Oracle can be much more user-friendly on this, because clients must provide a much more error handling framework, which is a monitoring framework, that is much better.
The current one has some level of monitoring, but then there are retrying mechanisms, automatically retrying mechanisms and error recovery mechanisms. Those things need to be greatly improved; they have something, but it is very basic.
The error retrying mechanism could be improved. If an error occurs, it can be retried automatically, it would be helpful.
Resilience can be enhanced.
The migration flow has to improve.
They have some kind of agent connecting with the on-premise systems. We need to simplify the process of connecting with non-cloud applications.
If you have to connect to some servers from this cloud to non-cloud, that is a bit of a hassle.
They now have something called an agent for those, but they can simplify it, and the error frameworks can be implemented much more effectively.
For how long have I used the solution?
ICS is the correct solution but it is a bit old. The advanced version of ICS is called OIC Gen 2 (Oracle Integration Cloud Generation 2).
We probably used ICS a few years ago. Those are now out of date, and Oracle will not be releasing that product. It is probably supported, but Oracle has migrated away from that product at least two years ago. With ICS, you can't just publish that because it's out of date. You may be able to correct it if Oracle upgraded it to OIC.
I have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service for two or three years. Not recently, but sometime in 2017 or 2018.
In the last 12 months we used it, but not the ICS version; instead, the most recent version was used.
OIC Gen 2 is the latest version.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability is, I believe, 90%. 10% is because the runtime system, at times, becomes unstable due to data center issues, or things that have gone wrong in productions. But that is probably only 2% of the problem; the remaining 8% will have intermittent problems.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There are some restrictions. That is something that bothers us because there are some service limitations. For example, the file size is limited to this amount; there are some restrictions. Oracle claims that it is being restricted internally due to performance issues.
If you use a file larger than a GB or something, they offer very different adapters with different restrictions, that is all.
According to the current situation, we will either split the file and then manage it internally. But it adds a lot of, sometimes unnecessary, overhead for us because the team implements; we need to improve that. There are some things they can work on to improve.
The solution is only used by the core IT team; no one else uses it. It will be a five-person team from the client's side.
Not more than five, because the client's IT teams are limited to five people, and they only manage it. There are a maximum of five people.
We use it every day.
How are customer service and support?
On a scale of one to five, I would rate technical support as four. 1 percent of the time, Oracle responses, support status, depending on the engineer, I believe 1 percent will be a good or bad experience.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
On the technology side, we have something called Oracle Autonomous Database or Oracle Integration Cloud on the platform.
Google Cloud Platform I worked with a few years ago, but not recently. However, I am currently involved with Oracle Cloud.
We were using it for one of our Mexican clients. We probably used it for a year and a half. They are still using it, but I am not in contact with that client, but everything is going well for them.
I understand the fundamentals of Google Cloud SQL as well as other frameworks they provide, such as Spark. We also used their database.
Spark by Apache. That is something; that was used to handle all of the panel processing tasks and was something we didn't have in Oracle. We won't have as much leverage in Oracle, but we'll have many tools.
We use them primarily for performance handling. Heavy data can be easily processed in a memory partition, which they do in the memory, and then process in different pipelines concurrently, which is made efficient. That was really good, and they had a lot of leverage in terms of monitoring those files that were being loaded into the system. They had detailed logging and could monitor everything from their consoles. Which is good.
I am familiar with the Java Cloud and the Developer Cloud, but neither was used by us. Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, also known as ATP, is what we used. Not mobile Autonomous Transaction Processing Database It has nothing to do with mobile; it is simply Oracle or ATP.
The beauty of this Autonomous Transaction Processing is that it is nothing more than a database, but it is not the database cluster that Oracle provides. The main advantage of this is that, as you can see, everything is managed internally by artificial intelligence. You want to scale the processor's memory, but everything is already scaled.
There is no DVA to maintain that; it all happens automatically. When you submit a request, it is automatically adjusted and scalable.
Not Oracle Data Integration Cloud Service, which is designed specifically for data conversion, but rather a middleware, solution from Oracle, that is known as SOA Suite. Oracle has an SOA suite, but the thinner version of it is, and this is one Oracle is promoting, it is Oracle Integration Cloud.
Google is in Oracle because we are mostly all Oracle. Oracle, because we only tried the Google platform once because the client specifically requested it.
We normally recommend it because this Oracle product integrates with all Oracle products and we only implement Oracle products. This easily connects with all Oracle products in the ecosystem, the time you save is actually beneficial.
Then this product is very specific to Oracle, it can be general, but it has very good features when trying to integrate with Oracle products.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is easy.
I would rate the initial setup a four out of five.
This is where the deployment side comes into play. Oracle does not provide an out-of-the-box way to migrate or deploy from one environment to another. This needs to be improved. We can do it in a custom way, but Oracle should have some sort of migration flow.
What about the implementation team?
This solution requires a developer, an administrator, and multiple developers to maintain it. I mean, depending on the size of your project, you can have a minimum of 2, 3 up to 10, depending on the complexity of your system.
What was our ROI?
As this is a cloud, I have seen a return on investment. It has reduced the number of administrators required to maintain the servers, but this is due to the fact that they are autonomous self-services.
I would rate it a five out of five.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Licensing costs vary from client to client, depending on the client's other products purchased.
They look at discounts, and these are all based on a contract, not a flat rate. It specifies how much data you use and how much storage you require, among other things.
Depending on the requirements. For example, it depends on the message, and how much data throughput will go through.
I would rate the price a three out of five.
I know there are many other competing products, but Oracle can probably be a little bit cheaper than this.
There are no additional fees to the standard licensing fee.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We explored Google, as well as MuleSoft, and Dell has an integration solution.
What other advice do I have?
In general, there are multiple platforms with the Oracle platform. For example, in Google Cloud, one of the services is a database. Oracle can also have multiple services, corresponding database service, that is an Oracle database service. But, to the best of my knowledge, that framework is not available in Oracle. Google is more Java-based, so they have a lot of Java frameworks that can be used.
We will recommend this to all of our clients because it is a feature that Oracle is promoting, and it is working well for us.
We recommend that you use this product.
I strongly advise them to use this if they are using Oracle-related solutions, and they can definitely try it because, in addition to Oracle, it has other connectivities, such as I mentioned Concur, Coupa, and SAP. They have connectors for that as well, they should try it out.
I would rate Oracle Integration Cloud Service an eight out of ten.
The remaining two are due to pending items. It's a bit lightweight. When it comes to heavy volume data handling, they should improve something, but the rest is fine.
We are Oracle's golden partners. We implement Oracle products.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner