Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

We made all our system integrations on Oracle SOA Suite.

Oracle SOA Suite improved my organization through system integration. My organization didn't have a way to integrate systems in the past, so the solution has helped the organization through integrations.

What I like best about Oracle SOA Suite is Oracle support. I also like the tool features, especially the integration feature.

An area for improvement in Oracle SOA Suite is the cost. It could be lower. My company even thought about moving to an open-source product, WSO2, but decided that microservice architecture would be best for the company's architectural approach and use cases, such as building systems.

I've been using Oracle SOA Suite for fifteen years now.

Stability-wise, I'd rate Oracle SOA Suite as nine out of ten. Sometimes my company has some problems with stability, but the solution is mostly pretty stable.

I didn't have any problems scaling Oracle SOA Suite, so it's a ten out of ten for me, scalability-wise.

I found Oracle SOA Suite technical support good, so I'd rate it a seven. I remembered cases that various persons were handling. For example, one support person was finishing up on the case, but then the other support person was starting on it, and the knowledge of the case wasn't that good, and that was a critical case, so I can't give a higher rating for support.

Neutral

We're moving away from Oracle SOA Suite and will eventually use microservice architecture.

The initial setup for Oracle SOA Suite is seven out of ten.

Oracle SOA Suite was deployed long ago, and I wasn't with the company when it was deployed.

My company's ROI from Oracle SOA Suite is not bad because the solution works. If I were to rate it ROI-wise, it would be a seven.

Based on my knowledge, Oracle SOA Suite doesn't have user-based licensing. It has a system-based licensing model, so you pay for whole systems.

Oracle SOA Suite is an expensive solution, so it's a four out of ten for me. My company is switching to another solution because of the cost, but there's no additional cost associated with Oracle SOA Suite except for the standard fees.

My company uses Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), particularly Oracle SOA Suite. My company will replace it with a microservices solution, but not for some time.

I'm using an up-to-date version of Oracle SOA Suite.

Within the company, about two thousand people use the solution. Mainly end users with some admins. Any user of systems integrated via Oracle SOA Suite probably uses the solution as well.

About eight people handle the deployment and maintenance of Oracle SOA Suite, though not dedicated to just this solution or task.

I'd tell anyone looking into Oracle SOA Suite that, technically, it's a pretty good solution and has knowledgeable support. It's just its cost that needs improvement, so it would be wise to look at alternatives. Oracle SOA Suite is also pretty old technology if you compare it with other solutions, so my company is trying to move to a different kind of architecture, the microservices.

My rating for Oracle SOA Suite is seven out of ten.

There are many facets to this product, but we have primarily been making use of SCA, BPEL, Mediators, and JMS, along with a number of extension products. We are expecting to make extensive use of several other aspects of the SOA (and its containing WebLogic server) in the near future, specifically OSB and Coherence.

It has allowed us to build integrations using an enterprise-class platform. It has also meant that we have been able to purchase prebuilt integrations from Oracle for their products, meaning we have been able to focus largely on our own solutions.

It should be noted, and we have proven with our own experience, that to really get good value out of the product you need to have some good development approaches, as well as knowledgeable people on the team because middleware is very easy to do badly, and then it becomes an impediment. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility.

With the availability of Maven the adoption of Continous Integration can be really driven fowards.

Configuration of the product is a very complex and demands a lot of knowledge, but we do recognize this is the process to pay for a flexible platform. Nevertheless, providing simplified tools for common activities would be very helpful.

My employer has been using Oracle SOA Suite for three to four years. I have been working as an architect for this amount of time as well.

Deployments are complex.

Once correctly configured, scaling and stability have not been an issue. When issues have occurred, we have traced the problems back to poor deployment configuration, particularly environment factors such as the network, etc.

Oracle official support channels can be a bit slow (although no worse then any other significant vendor, e.g. Red Hat). But there is a wealth of information in the Oracle community that can help, and it is possible to seek help through the community if you know how.

Additionally, if you have appropriate contacts within Oracle, then you can reach out that way as well and typically see friendly, responsive engagement.

We have in the past heavily used Red Hat's Fuse products. They're also good, but require a far greater level of investment in good development skills to exploit. The need for more basic development skills has meant the development of the ISO of on-site integration practices.

It's complex for 11g, but in getting started with the new 12c platform, we have seen far greater development although production environment are still a fairly sophisticated task.

The majority of the work we have had done with Oracle SOA Suite has been through a major systems integrator with a few internal individuals with some knowledge for basic operational support. Given the choice, use smaller specialist Oracle partners -- they may cost more per person, but they know how to get the most out of the platform and can deliver a lot more in the same time. The big SIs we have seen approach things with just training staff to use the tools and then assume that is good enough, rather than invest in the underlying principles and support the development of good skills through experience.

Do some upfront work to figure out what you're likely to want to do with the technology and get some meaningful volumetrics before you start negotiating on licensing. The Oracle PaaS platform offers an opportunity to try and see and understand the art of the possible before you start ramping up. Without this, you may find that you buy into license constraints to keep the cost down and then later regret the constraints. Understand how to get the most of the pre-sales engagement. Oracle can offer a lot here to help you bottom out the right solutions to make sure you get it.

If you're starting from scratch with Oracle, seed your team with some resources who have knowledge and reputation. Invest in your own people to develop knowledge in the breadth of the tool. Even if you use SLS to deliver, having some knowledge of your own can help hold them to account. This is most critical if you've engaged them on a fixed-price model as they will want to keep the cost down, which might work to your best interests.

• The EM console
• The WebLogic Server
• The SOA suite
• The BPEL processes.
• I think it's good, as we have done our POC on 12c, and it comes with great features, like all-in-one installation, management from one console, enhanced JVM for great throughput, and memory management.

12c play around reviews

12.1.3== SAP adapter dave so much trouble while configuring it.

Not proper documentation is helpful from Oracle.

After the installation and configuration the classes and jars are not loaded which leads to issues with Fusion SAP connectivity.

Over all the The look and feel of the EM console is ok.

I would recommend to use this version of product with 1.7_81_ version of Java/jre environment.

The rcu is combined inside the soa infra jar installation so that is good thing that I found as I don't have to worry about the RCU to download and install and then configure the SOA_INFRA schema's.

so good this is fair deal of my experience. Happy SOA.!!!!

This product provides a robust and scalable integration solution for our organization’s business needs.

In the current version of SOA Suite 11.1.1.7.8, we are having fewer issues as compared to earlier versions. We have had severe issues being denied, and upon following up with Oracle these have not yet been solved.

I've been using it for the last six years.

Stability is sometimes a challenge.

It’s a very scalable application.

3/5

Oracle being reliable, robust and scalable is always chosen.

Initial setup was full of learning.

We implemented it on our own, although on certain modules the Oracle team had helped us.

It’s a bit costly.

I think the world is moving is towards Cloud solutions and in the same path Oracle has cloud solutions, if you are ready to shell out few extra bucks for your Business’s IT infra and solutions, then Oracle is the one.

We use this solution for complex integrations between disparate systems that can be done securely, as light-weight services, automation, recovery, robust ETL options, and a lot more.

Comparing with other integration products, Oracle SOA Suite, being offered by Oracle Corporation, brings along a lot of benefits like Cloud and Database features that are an integral part of their offering.

This solution is specifically suitable for applications or systems that would not provide any option to share data or integrate with each other. Having data from applications like a parking system imported into the financial system reduces the revenue processing cycle by ninety percent, with the added benefits of automation, security, and reliability.

Oracle SOA Suite has been in use for more than a decade at our organization and has provided a lot of benefits across the departments.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the option to design, and the development can happen at the same time. Also, it can be done by business users as Oracle SOA Suite allows designing the logical flows that get translated into the actual implementation for the integration.

We have automated incident reporting and closure for critical applications, which is a function that has been very valuable. 

With respect to the feature that allows each process to be accessible and reviewed at a later time, it is a great debug option, but we did notice the database size getting larger by the day. Is there any option available that will allow the process history to be moved to a different schema? If so, it would not affect the performance.

If the disk space expansion can be made more flexible, not requiring a database restart, it would be a major benefit.

We have evaluated MuleSoft and other ETL products. We found Oracle SOA Suite to be the most suitable for our needs, with Cloud features and Database compatibility.

Our primary use case is for integrated systems within the entire company.

The most valuable feature of the facility, as the partner link, is to try to use third-party services and logic in your own vehicle to orchestrate the information.

I would like to see divided containers more separately as a microservice.
Try to convert more in microservices and be less monolith than it is, because at this time it is more monolith than microservice.

I have been using Oracle SOA Suite for thirteen years.

It is definitely a stable match solution.

You can use whatever OS system you would like. You can use Linux or Windows. And, at the same time, you can try to grow with nodes, if you need it with a load balancer. In the end, you have the facilities to grow in the future. We have several hundred individuals using the solution daily.

The home customer support is very efficient. If you put in a ticket, depending on the priority, probably they answer immediately in one hour, not more than that. If you need phone support it is there in case you need it.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy. I think in a week it can be implemented if we have the entire infrastructure.

It depends on your needs. If you need to integrate a variety of systems having multiple logics inside your layer of integration Oracle SOA Suite is a good fit. For example, if you have a service that may propose to receive something from one system, but later consumes different information in other systems, and later transfers the data in another way that the other systems have to consume. On a scale of one to ten Oracle SOA Suite ranks a nine out of ten.

Some of the valuable features of SOA Suite are obviously integration, integrating two different systems together to be able to create web services on top of back end systems and expose those both internally and externally. To be able to do transformation, translation of data so that two proprietary systems can communicate. Also really to be able to create services and APIs that can be able to support business processes as well as consumer and composite applications. Oracle SOA Suite is really designed for those types of features.

Some of the benefits of Oracle SOA are like I was talking about earlier, transformation of fields and data elements. Transaction management as you're integrating two different proprietary systems, being able to manage that transaction and an end-to-end business process.

Orchestration, the ability to be able to apply business rules and different types of rules on top of what your integration and your business processes are. The main benefit is really to integrate proprietary systems that can't naturally communicate with each other through services, through APIs and to be able to reuse those services into composite applications. Be able to reuse those services in workflows, in business processes or whatever the pattern may be. The ability to expose data between these systems as both a provider of information and a consumer of information.

More cloud adoption would be good because SOA Suite has a lot of adoption for a lot of on-premise customers and they're just getting started with the cloud adoption model. We'd also like to see some more lightweight, light-scale versions of it. It's like one of their greatest assets can also be one of their greatest detriments which is it comes so feature-rich in such a big product that it sometimes can be an expensive product. Some customers just want a low-scale, lightweight version of the tool and we see quite a bit of need for that. Some improvements on API management, the ability to create APIs on top of services to manage those and the analytics of those, would be some good features that we'd like to see as well.

Oracle SOA has been a rock solid enterprise-level tool for many years. It's really foundationally built on WebLogic and so it has a lot of scalability built into it. I've seen implementations that support millions of transactions per day, hundreds of trading partners, hundreds of web services and APIs. The scalability and the ability for capacity growth has always been there and has always been a fundamental tenet and one of the fundamental principles of Oracle SOA Suite. Because it is an enterprise service bus, it has to be able to have that level of scalability. The implementations really are dependent on what the customer use cases are. Because it's such a feature-rich product there's a lot you can do with it and there's a lot of good ways to implement SOA and there's a lot of bad ways to implement SOA.

Usually the tipping point is about 25 integrations. If a customer is hand-coding or hand developing their integrations in a custom platform like Java or  .NET. Once you hit about 25 integrations, that's a good time to say, "Hey, I may need more of a commercial platform approach where I can get features such as air handling, login, analytics, transaction management." All these that are built in into a battle-tested product, that's when you start hitting that tipping point. At about 25 integrations is when a customer should begin to look at making that type of investment.

Some of the good ways to implement SOA in a traditional, agile, system development lifecycle is really trying to understand what are the functional use cases. What is the business process that needs the support? Some of the other key aspects are being able to understand what is the universal data model that you're going to be integrating? Right? What are the fields and elements on the back ends' system that's providing the information and what are fields and elements on the consuming system? Then be able to come up with a semantic level, canonical level mapping between those two and be able to create a universal data object. Create a loosely coupled implementation.

Traditionally building integrations does follow a system development lifecycle. Traditionally going through requirements, design sessions, integration, development, testing and so forth, There's a lot of techniques to do those rapidly in an agile-like way but there's also some ways to also blueprint those so that they're well documented, well understood. It helps keep your technical debt low for organizations who have to manage and maintain these over the course of many different years. Oracle SOA is well-designed, it is a product that we've implemented many times over and we've built a lot of best practices to help customers understand the complexity or take some of the complexity out. Because at the end of the day it is a platform, it's not a shrink wrapped solution. It's a platform that you have to be able to build things on and if you're not building things the right way, you can easily create what we call 'spaghetti architecture'. Which is building a bunch of point-to-point integrations between these systems that is not loosely coupled, not reusable and not scalable because they're not following good design patterns. If you're going that approach which unfortunately we see some customers do, then that could get you in trouble. We've got some frameworks and some solutions on how to avoid those types of architectures and designs.

We have a checklist because we actually end up being independent advisors, we've helped a number of customers with evaluation, score carding and selection. Because at the end of the day SOA Suite is not the only product out there. There's other products such as MuleSoft, WSO2, they all have integration platforms too that Oracle is competing with. It really is what platform is the best for the customer? Some of the key criteria, what we see are how easy is it for a developer to build integrations, how quickly can they do it, how quickly can they deploy their applications to products? Does it integrate well with DevOps and version control systems? How robust is their login and analytics? Some of these are key fundamental features for a lot of enterprise-level customers. Those need to work or the customer can really get themselves in trouble if for example a transaction fails. What do I do? If you don't have good features in the product to recover from such situations, that can lead to a lot of headaches for a lot of our Fortune 2000 clients.

Rating: I would give it a solid eight. I want to say ten but nothing is perfect. Gartner does rate it as one of the leading vendors in their quadrants, so that's always good as well. We've seen a lot of adoption, a lot of Oracle customers have bought it and it's got a lot of good features. The reason why I may not give it a nine or 10 are some of the things that we talked about earlier, some of the potential weaknesses around cloud enablement, lightweight enablement, pricing, things like these. That have been a little bit of inhibitors to some of the smaller and medium-sized customers and around API management as well.

From an enterprise service bus, SOA-level product, we definitely think it's one of the leaders out there. We can certainly help a customer with an evaluation and selection, you can learn more at our website, visualintegrator.com. Some of the things I would absolutely look at, at least three to five vendors in this space, come up with your key use cases, your key functional use cases, your key technical use cases, provide waiting criteria on those and scorecard these vendors. Scorecard then on their capabilities, ask them to do a proof of concept, always important. A lot of them will do developer day workshops with you.

Ask them to do something like this and really take a look at a selection of vendors to see what is the best fit for your organization. Because the reality is you have choices out there and SOA Suite maybe the perfect fit for you, it may not be the perfect fit for you. You really have to take a look at it and say, "Does it fit my needs with their features, with their pricing, with support and so forth?" Really do that level of evaluation and selection. That's one of the things we actually incidentally specialize in helping customers with as independent advisors. Certainly if a customer were to do that, those are the things I would certainly focus on.

We utilize SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) as a service tool to integrate between Oracle and the websites. Primarily as a service integration tool to communicate from many sources into our ERP system. Oracle SOA suite is the middle-ware (middleman) responsible to import all the orders into the Oracle system of records. Additionally we use SOA's B2B suit to integrate to our B2B partners.

I see it as a platform rather than an oracle traditional product.

It's a very critical tool for us. It not only helps us import the orders from our eCommerce platform, but it also helps us to integrate to other third-party products. Those third-party products could be home grown, or other B2C sites or business-to-business sites.

It also helps us keep up with the speed. Whenever we need a quick integration, it's a great tool to call services(any source/destination) and get the integration done on-time. We are less worried about integrating to any third party software because SOA being part of our footprint.

I would like to see better mobile-friendly services. Desktop use is diminishing and customers have moved to smart phones and other Mobil devices . SOA has some mobile services already, but they're not very user-friendly (may be also depending on what version of SOA you are using). We would like to see a focus on mobile-friendly web services moving forward.

The second important aspect I would like to get improved is the User Interfaces. Especially for troubleshooting purposes, I do see a room to improve how a support executive can figure out an issue. In the current world a lot of troubleshoot happens by viewing a payload , which is not the best way to figure out a problem. A better UI can help to minimize the troubleshoot time.

By and large it is a stable product in my experience. There are down sides as well, however. I think handling very high load, the product has to develop some more maturity. For example, the stability becomes problematic when we are processing millions of records at the same time. Putting up more infrastructure can always help.

Scalability and Stability are linked to each other as they impact each other.

It is scalable. You have to spend a little more money to scale it up. Our system handles transactions and products both. If we segregate and have parallel systems(servers) for transactions v/s products, it can be a better performing system.

(5/10)Oracle does not offer support that meets our expectations. We need in-house expertise so that can we manage. You cannot rely on Oracle support. It's an Oracle product at the end of the day, but I don't think the support is up to the mark.There are less knowledgeable people on SOA compared to the other Oracle propriety products.

It all depends on the business model of the company selecting a solution. It's not a complex tool in terms of building/utilizing services. It is a comprehensive service mediation tool and can handle heterogeneous service integrations . Businesses can utilize it as key performance tool as well. SOA allows enterprises to use BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), a run time business matrix from the various applications to provide important insight into the health of its operations and business activities.

Depending on how an enterprise explores it and leverages it, there are lot of benefits that can be reaped out of this comprehensive tool.

Recommendations:

I would recommend that people have some in-house expertise to handle this product. People who really want to use this solution need to know the product well before they use it.

We mainly use the solution internally to interface between two applications. 

We also use it for our external customers. They send us data and we transform that data to use in our applications, or we store it in our database for further use.

An important area that can be improved is the product's data monitoring. When we use the solution for interfacing or end-to-end data monitoring, we want to know exactly where the data is going and exactly where it is failing, or where there is an issue.

Our organization has been using this product for 10 years.

It is stable because it's quite an old product from Oracle.

Since we are using the solution on-premises, scalability may be the real challenge. We are moving towards using the cloud or Oracle cloud, so maybe the scalability will be easier if we move to the cloud. This challenge isn't caused by Oracle, it's because it is on-premises. I don't want to blame Oracle for the scalability challenges.

Oracle's technical support is not very good, but it is good.

Neutral

It was not really complex and not really straightforward. It was somewhere in between the two.

We are currently using the DevOps model, so it is deployed through DevOps. Deployment is not taking much time because we are not doing it manually. It is an automated deployment.

Usually regarding Oracle products, deployment takes time because it requires manual effort to go around and deploy the code correctly.

Over one thousand people in my organization use this solution, including external customers, IT engineers, and our administration team. This is a middleware product for our organization. I mean that it's one of the critical products for my company, and we use it extensively. We currently use each and every feature of Oracle SOA.

I would rate this product either a six or a seven. If you are going to use this product, I suggest making sure that it is designed well by an architect so you can use it effectively. The effectiveness depends on the architect who is going to introduce and implement this product.