Oracle Integration Cloud Service Reviews

Use cases are integrating between SaaS and other applications, Oracle SaaS and other applications, predominantly for payment gateways and various other vendor-related applications, and connectivity between Oracle SaaS applications and the Oracle Cloud.

There are many functionalities. Fundamentally, it provides all the ready-to-use services for consumption between SaaS and other applications. 

For various vendor applications, we have the most famous vendors. It is Oracle ready-to-use. So, the real integration efforts are coming down day by day, quarter after quarter, because of that.

Implementation becomes much faster. Go-to-market is much better. They are fast to market and ready to use. All those things are there. I have not seen any major challenges or anything like that. 

We use deliverables only. We are not using any other automation services that OIC (Oracle Integration Cloud) offers. That is the only thing we take up as part of the services. We have not done any separate automation services. We have not explored them yet.

Other than ready-to-use solutions and services to consume it, anything has to be developed. It has to be developed. And all the other Oracle PaaS solutions have to be procured to develop, deploy, and start using it. So sometimes what happens is such things become an expensive proposition, though it is a powerful solution.

The only thing is, if I have to build a solution, I have to start consuming the other services on the cloud, which becomes a pretty expensive solution if I have to develop it. So that’s the only thing.

In fact, we are also part of the product. We are a partner with Oracle, and we are also working with their product team on this, giving feedback and things like that. That is an ongoing process between us and Oracle.

Oracle needs to ensure that some of the most commonly used types of consumption or services are bundled—for every industry, every vertical, and even region-specific services like payment gateways, suppliers, and logistics suppliers—so that they can be consumed straight away. This would provide absolute value for money in terms of time to market, faster deliverables, and quick implementation.

I have been using it for five years. Previously, it was SOA Cloud Services. Now it is Integration Cloud Service. Together, we have been working for the last five years.

Stability is good. Once it is implemented and rolled out, stability is absolutely fine after production.

Scalability is very quick and fast. That is not an issue. It’s really elastic. There are absolutely no issues. But it is only Oracle Cloud. It is nowhere else. The only advantage is Oracle Cloud Customer is there. That option comes as part of that also. 

For large customers, it can be used.  

The customer service and support are actually good.  In fact, they’re so much more proactive nowadays. They have invested a good amount of money in that proactivity.  

Oracle started with SaaS, but now it has expanded to other areas. So, there are many competitors. But for this type of service, which they need to opt for, there is no way we cannot, even if you go for it. So, that stickiness is there with Oracle because of the SaaS transaction.

The initial setup is simple. OIC is meant only for Oracle Cloud.

The only thing is that it is possible with a Cloud customer.

It is not really a high price for the value it gives. However, when you start doing the customization, it’s a bit expensive because I need to start provisioning other services before deployment. 

So from that angle, it is slightly expensive. Otherwise, it is a value for whatever the product is offering.

I would like to recommend it for all. Whoever is opting for SaaS, even small, mid, and enterprise customers, I would recommend it.

Oracle has already embedded AI, and I think that is being offered now by them. We are yet to explore it. We have just gone through the details and demos and things like that. We have not implemented it yet in any live customer place. 

I would recommend the product to other users. 

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. I strongly believe everything needs continuous development and improvement. So in that context, I would like to keep it at eight.

Whatever data is going in and out of Oracle, we are using Oracle Integration Cloud Service for any inbound or outbound integrations.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service can improve file handling. Currently, our real-time file polling limitation is 10 MB, if that size can be increased it would be helpful. For example, increasing the size from 10 MB to 1 GB.

I have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service for approximately 

We have been satisfied with the performance of Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service is scalable.

We have approximately 30 IT experts in my small organization. We have plans to increase the usage of the solution in the future.

Oracle has a support portal where we can raise a service request and we can have our issues addressed. They provide an average level of support.

I have not used another similar solution prior to Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

The initial setup of Oracle Integration Cloud Service was easy.

The deployment is very easy to export from one and import from another, it only requires a simple one-button click. For 100 integrations it can take 30 minutes. We usually use microservice for very small integrations and then connect them together.

The deployment of Oracle Integration Cloud Service was done in-house.

We have one person who does the deployment and maintenance of Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

My advice to others is if you are looking for integrations with other Oracle solutions, then this is a great choice. Otherwise, you can explore other middleware platforms.

I rate Oracle Integration Cloud Service an eight out of ten.

In our customers' organizations, Oracle Integration Cloud Service mainly integrates their other applications with the Oracle Fusion stack. It's very handy in scenarios where they want to seamlessly maintain data flow between applications, with business tools and logic validations in place.

One of the most valuable features in our integration projects is the wide range of connectivity options. OIC has built-in adapters for almost every important product in the marketplace, allowing easy connections to various applications with minimal technical interference. It also connects well with databases, file services, and object storage. The error handling capabilities are good, with rich logging features and logging analytics, allowing proactive error monitoring and notifications.

In terms of measurable benefits, we've helped clients integrate about 50 applications from different geographies using OIC Service as an enterprise integration platform.

It isn't specifically for AI-driven projects; it does provide Integration Insights, which gives some predictive measures about the integrations that have run.

The solution should improve its support. 

I've worked with Oracle Integration Cloud Service for three to four years. I'm OIC certified and have been generally satisfied with the product. 

Apart from the initial learning curve, we didn't face major challenges during implementation. Once the team got familiar with the product, it was quite easy to use thanks to its drag-and-drop interface and low-code/no-code principles.

Oracle uses a universal credit model for OCI. Clients commit to an annual budget and can choose which products to use and build during their contract period. Billing is based on consumption - you're only billed for the products you use.

I would recommend the product to others, especially companies already using Oracle as their ERP and application platform. However, companies with established integration platforms might prefer to stick with those. It has improved much with recent releases and versions, much better than three to four years back.

I would rate Oracle Integration Cloud Service between eight and nine on a scale of one to ten. They've improved performance and scalability greatly over the past few years. The main area they still need to work on is technical support, not just for the tool but across their entire product line. That's the only area where I feel they're a bit behind.

The main use case is "systems integration" for my company's enterprise customers across many different industry sectors.

Many of our customer projects use Oracle Integration Cloud or OIC iPaaS for integrations between disparate systems like ERP, e-commerce, and warehouse systems, from both Oracle and other vendors and technologies. Integration flows were developed for keeping product inventory, prices, addresses in sync between various end-systems and to support key business processes spanning many systems, departments, and organisations. 

Additional non-functional goals were maintainability, stability, scalability, graceful error-handling, decoupling for loose-coupling of distinct core systems, and "predictable performance". The predictability has been verified via repeatable testing and seamless operation in production. 

Additionally, we have implemented other use-cases like shipping integration (such as DHL, FedEx), order flows from e-commerce to ERP, & many more granular and custom use cases specific to customer needs (e.g. implementing internal APIs to support larger enterprise business processes or application user interfaces, bulk data reconciliation and many more).

In general, a cloud-based product helps avoid the high lead-up times and maintenance overheads involved in setting up in-house infrastructure, and this is adequately achieved by OIC iPaaS. 

OIC, in particular, is also well integrated with Oracle SaaS ERP via "business events" and easy to integrate via Rest APIs (though other integration platforms also offer API-based integration, it makes a lot of sense to use OIC if a customer already uses Oracle SaaS). The recent addition of the Kafka-compatible OCI Streaming has since early 2023 allowed us to support a loosely-coupled event-driven integration between different products from different vendors, built on different technologies, and supporting different throughputs.

OIC offers a number of pre-built technology and SaaS adapters for high productivity for a wide range of target systems, both in-house via agents and cloud/SaaS, via a very flexible range of interfaces. These include APIs by way of Rest/SOAP over http/s, files like ZIP and CSV over filesystem or S/FTP, databases,  and more. All of these interface types were utilized in our customer solutions to deliver a range of functionality in the form of "integration flows".

To summarise: OIC helped us to deliver high quality software engineering to our customers, with our solutions being comparably high in supportability, maintainability, loose coupling between disparate core systems, high cohesion in deployable units, clean interfaces, predictable runtime performance and other important properties for supporting any major enterprise

It offered a natural transition from, and in some cases, it complements Oracle's existing middleware like SOA Suite (now SOACS), Oracle Service Bus, etc, for many but not all use cases.

Furthermore, it offers a compelling solution within the Oracle environment that makes it easier to integrate Oracle SaaS ERP (via business events, APIs) with any other cloud or in-house product that might support many different interface types. 

Our organization, as a neutral systems integrator with a "client advocacy" approach, also offers solutions built on open-source platforms like Apache Camel. However, the choice of platform depends on customer preferences, suitability, and fit with the rest of their IT environment. Singhpora Consulting aims to deliver good "Software Engineering", i.e. an optimal balance between upfront costs, quality, supportability, maintainability, and runtime performance to customers on tools and platforms best suited to them, rather than promote any one particular product. 

To have a realistic picture of Customers must however keep in mind that the mere fact that it is "cloud" and "iPaaS" does not mean a zero-effort pay-as-you-go solution. There is still quality technical design and skill required in actually producing a good solution to be deployed on it.

Moreover, there is still ongoing effort involved in "Systems Administration". This includes functions like physical or virtual network setup and administration, information security, DB administration, patching, updates, etc. These are not directly "iPaaS" functions but important supporting functions, and the quality of these functions can be critical in every project. Some of these functions are also shared between the cloud provider like Oracle, other vendors, or the customer. 

This is over and above quality and effort involved in the "Application Development" practice, which is what developers and applications architects do. We develop and deploy integration flows that run on the iPaaS platform.

Finally, the most important lesson from decades of Software Engineering should be that every IT system must be independently verifiable by professionals in a given area, such as accounting, supply chain management, or logistics. Automation (and increasingly AI) is valuable as a tool to scale up human effort, verifiability, accountability and explanability are very important properties of good solutions - OIC supports these via a visual flow designer, audit trails/OCI logging, transparency in business rules via the Decision Support System (DSS) component and many more inbuilt features, with adequate features to support more. 

Once customers to keep these expectations clear when making a realistic assessment on skills, budgets, intended outcomes, etc., solutions delivered on OIC can vastly improve efficiency and deliver great value to many enterprises. 

The most valuable features are (Reviewed and updated February 2024):

• Update Mar 2023-Feb 2024: OIC's native integration via the OCI Streaming Adapter with the Kafka compatible OCI Streaming service allowed us to develop a powerful and scalable integration with a third-party application chosen by the customer. This kept multiple core systems (built on different technologies, with different throughputs) completely decoupled. The setup of OCI Stream was much easier than a comparable messaging technology, as the setup was serverless. Scaling the message throughput was relatively easy via partitions, and third-party applications could use standard Kafka-compatible interfaces to produce and consume from the OCI Stream. 
• Update Aug 2022: The Decision Support System component or DSS(decision table and rules engine) in general is a valuable feature that is closley integrated with the OIC platform's enterprise edition. It can be used to externalise logic from deployable code (hence simplifying releases whilst making key business logic more configurable and transparent)
• Process Cloud Service (PCS) supports the industry standard Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) for business analysis. Being part of the OIC platform, this facilitates closer collaboration between various stakeholders from multiple departments and even multiple organisations participating in a business process 
• Easy to provision OIC environments (subject to security assessments and ensuring adequate security controls on endpoints)
• Predictable costs and pay for use billing
• It is easy to scale instances, though scalability also depends on how well designed the actual solution is that is being deployed on Oracle Integration Cloud.
• Decent designer interface for flow design and manipulation.
  
• Easy to promote across environments as environment-specific "Connections" are decoupled from the actual "deployable unit" (the *.iar archive). This is a big plus, as it is better for security (credentials don't leave the environment) and also maintainability (less chance of deployment errors, less chance of promoting a deployable unit meant for TEST into PRODUCTION). Some of the other technologies do not offer this decoupling and I have seen first hand some of the undesirable situations this can lead to in some badly implemented legacy environments.
• A range of connectors for different interfaces like files, sftp, http/s Rest/SOAP, databases, and more. With OIC, things "just work", with the right skills, experience, and attitude of course.
• Update Aug 2022/reviewed in gen2 Jan2023: For quite some time now, XSL editing has possible in both Designer and Code modes (as of this writing, some important XSL constructs such as variables are not usable in the browser based designer view, even though they have always been editable via an external IDE like JDeveloper)

Improvements can be made in several areas, as follows:

• Configurable timeouts on each connection would be better than a single global timeout that applies to all. The rationale for why timeouts are necessary is described here: https://weblog.singhpora.com/2019/07/fault-tolerance-in-integration-flows.html  In my opinion, this feature can actually save resources (CPU, memory) for Oracle and also deliver better runtime functionality to customers. 
• Retryable scopes and activities could be useful. 
• Easier ability to edit a DB operation via DBAdapter when a schema changes, such as a column added or removed from a table (Update Aug 2022: it's possible via the wizard but needs a slightly non-intuitive series of steps) 
• Ability to add Java libraries for very corner situations like file/ftp adapter valves, which is a feature that exists in Oracle Service Bus and can be very useful in some rare situations.
• OIC arteracts should support standard source control formatting for easier comparison across versions

We have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service since Q3 of 2018.

Stability-wise, it is excellent. See the note on scalability. A scalable solution is also stable and predictable in the event of "infinite load".

Scalability is an important non-functional requirement in any software engineering project. Scalability supports two other non-functional requirements: performance (e.g. throughput or data processed per unit time OR response time in a synchronous request-response scenario), and availability (for high availability, the environment needs more instances in a cluster so if one goes down, others can serve requests without causing downtime to consumers)

Scalability depends on two (occasionally competing) aspects:

1. Platform-level scalability; this is the ease of provisioning hardware, VMs, application server instances in a cluster, etc. In the case of Oracle Integration Cloud, this aspect is well abstracted away from application developers and fairly easy to manage. It can easily scale up or down.
   
   
2. The second important aspect of scalability is the actual technical design of the application. In OIC's case, "integration flow", that is deployed on the platform.

A well-designed solution can achieve the same performance on a fewer number of instances, less memory, and less CPU. A well-designed solution that is "scalability-friendly" would easily spread its load across multiple instances that might be available to it and its performance (throughput) would ideally improve linearly with an increase in the number of instances. An important quality of a scalable solution is also that in the event of "infinite load", it would only accept as much as it can easily process at a predictable rate given the resources available to it, and would then start accepting more as more resources are made available (a non-scalable solution would simply fail under such an 'overload' situation). 

It often happens that some of these application design level aspects of scalability get neglected, therefore, customers often end up incurring unnecessary costs in merely "platform-level" scalability with the expectation that "performance issues" would go away by throwing more OIC instances at an application. 

To deliver the best outcome to customers, both of the above perspectives on scalability need to be addressed. 

For our customer's use cases, we achieved this with our application design and repeated testing with large data volumes. We did not over-engineer or over-optimize, even when we felt the solution could be enhanced to perform with higher throughput, we took customer's feedback on when the throughput was acceptable for their immediate business objectives, to avoid diminishing returns

Technical support is excellent by and large, but could be better and more consistent.

Positive

The choice of technology depends on the customer's environment, suitability for their use case, preferences, and other needs. We deliver solutions on multiple technologies and each can have pros and cons. 

Oracle Integration Cloud was the best suited for some major enterprise customers. 

On other customer projects, we have delivered solutions on Mulesoft, Apache Camel, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Service Bus, and more.

There are many "conceptual" similarities that I can see as a Software Engineer, but there are very many implementation level differences not just limited to technology but also in vendor support, community eco-system, and quality of professionals. 

The initial setup was straightforward and it was easy to get productive. Oracle offered initial support and guidance as well, as they were keen for the technology to be adopted. 
However, enterprise customers MUST seek advice from qualified professionals around systems administration and network security, including penetration testing in consultation with Oracle, and must conduct a proper risk assessment as with any other non-trivial enterprise IT system whether or not it is cloud-based.

We developed in-house. Singhpora Consulting was sub-contracted to develop key parts of the solution

Many open-source products can offer a high level of customizability and no upfront licensing cost. However, there can be a high cost involved in provisioning infrastructure, expertise, and other aspects. 

In the case of Oracle Integration Cloud, costs can be "predictable" as far as the platform and infrastructure are concerned. The platform offers a range of pre-built adapters and connectors but it is a closed platform controlled by Oracle. This has pros and cons in terms of flexibility versus productivity.

Yes, identical usecases were implemented on multiple platforms to identify the optimal balance of cost, time, and quality

Self-promotion: Please visit https://weblog.singhpora.com or contact us directly on info@singhpora.com

Customers can contact us for no-obligations brief consultations for their use cases where they might consider our future involvement.

There are three major scenarios where we use the product. One is Oracle has applications integrated with other applications internal to the customers' organization. 

The second use case is having Oracle SaaS applications integrated with third-party suppliers or third-party integrator applications. For example, for a payment gateway of a bank. 

The third one is this OIC integration. Cloud services are used as a standardized integration platform, where they'll be used even for non-Oracle SaaS application purposes. In a hybrid model, they can use it for various applications. This becomes an integration platform to bring any other applications, whether upstream or downstream, connected to the product for services offering as well as consumption of the services.

The OIC is very good. It comes with a lot of pre-built integration APIs. It's already there, so it's very helpful for integrations and they can serve very specific purposes also. The actual good old days of programming or coding to make the integration work at a precise level of expertise or work is not needed. That's the advantage here. It's user-friendly.

The job of Oracle is to offer us a total service, including licenses, support fees, postings, visas, et cetera. Everything is bundled. That makes everything easier.

From a security perspective, a connectivity perspective, and the ability to set it up as a hybrid, the solution is very good.

It is easy to set up the product.

The solution is stable. 

We can scale the solution. 

We would love to have more and more ready-to-use interfaces from Oracle. We'd like to download the marketplace right away. We'd like it, so we don't have to put in so much effort with integration. Therefore, I'm still keen to see a continuation in the addition of ready-to-use interfaces. 

This solution is recent, however, we have been partners with Oracle for the last about 20 or 25 years. This solution is more recent. We've only used it for about four or five years if you include the previous version of the cloud product.

The solution is very stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good. 

It can scale. You can just keep provisioning it. Of course, you need additional computing power, however, you can always add it. It comes with a certain cost, which needs to be considered. That said, the scalability is there; you can increase, optimize, or decrease it also.

Technical support is really good, actually. There are no issues as such in terms of product support or anything like that. Everything is done from the Oracle side itself.

The solution is very straightforward and simple to set up. 

It is relatively easy and not that difficult. At the moment, you just provision and subscribe to it, you just need to provision it. We can do it on our own; it's not a big task.

Just to set it up, you don't need too many people. One person is enough to do the deployment. However, if you want to deploy various integrations, then it depends on the number of applications, and the number of integrations you need to deploy and set it up. If there are maybe ten to 15 integrations, you can do it in less than six weeks or so.

Still, if there are a lot of complexities and too many products are there, and you want to do it very quickly, then you need to add manpower to load it. Otherwise, it is relatively straightforward. Typically, you will need engineers to handle the deployment. 

We were able to handle the deployment ourselves. 

The return on investment is there, especially in terms of operations part. From a licensing perspective or management perspective, the patching, and all these other things are taken care of straight away by Oracle. We don't have to allocate time.

Therefore, maintenance administration or around 40% of the activities or efforts now happens automatically. Since it is ready to use and the majority of the services are available, there is a significant amount of time and labor savings in terms of effort reduction.

I'm an Oracle partner. 

We deal with the most up-to-date version of the product.

One has to understand their requirements before deploying the solution. You need to analyze it and see whether it is available for them to leverage its capabilities. Most of the interfaces are already in place. You just need to provision it and configure it. That's it.

This is a relatively new product. It may still need maturing, however, it is already quite good.

I'd rate it eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company to integrate with different applications.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that the tool has out-of-the-box adapters. It has a list of adapters, like pre-built adapters, that can be used. The adapters are used for most of the renowned applications, and Oracle has built-in adapters, which can help to quickly connect with the services just like how Salesforce has adapters for some services that helps with quickly integration.

In Oracle, most of the things are based on XML and SOAP Messages. Nowadays, JSON is also very much in use. Most of the integrations are JSON-based with mobile phones, and all are coming into the picture. Most of the digital integrations are based on JSON. If I use Oracle Service Bus, I know it mostly uses XML and Java-based or JSON objects. Oracle has most of the message exchanges between XML, and it supports SOAP Messages. The support for JSON should be more in Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

The tool offers very good capabilities for transforming XML and objects. With JSON, if the tool provides support similar to XML, then it would be helpful. Nowadays, most things are on JSON, both digital and mobile.

The pricing model could be more flexible for clients.

I have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service for two years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The tool is more suitable for enterprise businesses.

I have contacted the solution's technical support team, and they are good since they are readily available. Based on the priority, they respond. If we have raised P1 or P2 tickets, they are readily available. It depends on the priority of the ticket. For P1 tickets, they work twenty-four hours and seven days. The support is good, and we get it on time. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase is simple. It is not very complex, like moving something to the cloud.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours.

Pricing is not on the economic side since it is a tool for enterprise-sized companies.

I don't use much of the automation capabilities offered by the product.

I have not integrated Oracle Integration Cloud Services with AI tools.

Most of my technical experience is with Oracle only.

I recommend the tool to others.

I rate the tool a seven to eight out of ten.

I am a Technology Architect. Our company is an IT service company. We develop integrated solutions for different clients.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service is part of enterprise-wide integrations. It integrates different applications from both inside and outside the organization.

The product improved our organization due to the available adapters, which are already provided with the product licenses. This helps us integrate with new cloud applications such as CRM, ERP, or any other cloud application. The proprietary adapters are already available, giving us the upper hand to integrate with different applications.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Integration Cloud Service is its ease of use. We do not depend on any tool to develop it. Everything is on the browser and is easy to integrate, even for someone who does not understand a lot about coding. 

Everything from development to deployment is seamless. It is a one-stop shop for all integration.

While most of the adapters are available through Oracle Integration Cloud Services, they do not have a lot of features. I would like to see some enrichment in this area and for the solution to go deeper into the applications and upgrade the adapters.

When comparing the solution to its on-premise solution which is also in the Oracle space, Oracle Suite, it is not as feature-rich as the on-premise solutions. It is still at a different level and will take some time to reach that level.

In future releases, Oracle could benefit from improvements to orchestration and level of monitoring. Some design aspects are not present in orchestration and there needs to be a more granular level of monitoring or more dashboards. 

I would like to see this product be more compatible and support the deployment on other clouds like AWS or Azure. 

I have been working with Oracle Integration Cloud for six years.

This is a very stable solution.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service is scalable. It's all configurations. We have approximately 500 people using this solution including IT developers, IT leads, IT designers, and IT architects.

Oracle takes care of the server maintenance and patching. Deployment is taken care of by the developers.

Support at Oracle is good, but not excellent. It takes time to resolve some issues.

In the past, we used Oracle Suite.

The initial setup of Oracle Integration Cloud Service is straightforward. Nothing needs to be done. Deployment takes minutes. I would rate the initial setup a five out of five.

We deploy in-house as we are using different DevOp tools for deployments. Oracle Integration Cloud Service supports all kinds of DevOps tools, so it is up to the client how they want to deploy the solution.

Our clients procure the licenses from Oracle and negotiate their own deals. The pricing varies. The solution is less expensive than other products.

This product only supports the deployment on Oracle's own cloud, it does not support AWS or Azure. This may deter other vendors who do not wish to deploy on Oracle Cloud.

Any organization that uses Oracle applications will find this solution very convenient to move into the proper cloud setup. If they require a cloud-to-cloud integration within a short timeframe, this would be an easy solution to use without issue. 

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

If I want to integrate with my on-premise application at the financial organization finance, I can do so. I can use the SAT finance and I have Oracle Fusion as my HR solution. I can send information from Oracle Fusion to Oracle SAP. Integration is required and I can use OICS for the dashboard. I can use two types of approaches - one is a real-time approach, and another is the best processing approach. I would always prefer to go with that best processing approach, and if we set a middle layer. It's good, however, to have options.

In the middle layer, I can set up one type of integration - a Journey integration. With the Journey integration, are have personal-related information. It is already, readily, available. 

Overall, it's a very good product.

It offers a lot of stability and flexibility. 

The initial setup is easy.

The solution did use to have stability issues, however, that is now dealt with.

The solution is expensive. 

We would always prefer any solution to be more secure. 

I'd rate the solution for three to four years now. I've used it for a while. 

For the first few years, the solution was not stable. It is much more stable now in this instance. It's been stable for about two years or so now. 

We have seven or eight clients using this solution currently. They use a variety of other Oracle products as well that we have helped arrange. 

Oracle has a great dedicated service team. If you have to make a service request, you will get the solution. A forum is also available as are landing guides, which are quite helpful. Based on my experience, they are readily available to assist in multiple ways.

The initial setup is easy. However, the provisioning is employee-based. The provisioning is based on the message list, that we have purchased. 

It did not take that long especially if you have already worked with or had Oracle. Some pre-setup is required, from an organizational perspective. For us, we took data from our on-premises system and installed the OIC agent. 

Our middle layer isn't accessible from anywhere purposefully. That integration was via the internet only. 

In general, the setup and other requirements surrounding the implementation will take time. We had to arrange policies, et cetera, before even beginning the setup process. 

The price could be better and they need to work on their licensing model to make it easier for users. 

We are an implementor. I'm also an Oracle Prime customer. I'm currently using that Oracle for many years and I have a complete ecosystem in Oracle.

Earlier, due to instability, at that time I would never suggest that anyone go with that OICS, integration cloud service. However, now that Oracle has improved a lot in the OIC part, I would recommend it. However, it depends on that ecosystem. If the surrounding technology is related to Oracle, it's a great integration tool. I would always prefer that OICS. However, some SAP or some other tools might not be as available and we would have to build some custom solution. Of course, rather than the customized adapter, we would prefer to go with a standardized one. It really just depends on the environment.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.