Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

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.

• Integration Adapters
• Oracle Web Service Manager
• Oracle Web Service Manager security polices
  Enterprise Management
• Meta datastore
• BPEL

In the company I work, we specialize in integration solutions. With this, we are able to perform quick deliveries and clients are happy that their time to market is reduced. Prototyping a solution with this is very simple.

We've been using it for four years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We faced some issues, particularly in clustered environments.

We haven't needed to scale it.

Through the Oracle Technology Network, we were able to get decent technical support.

The initial set up was easy, as there are lot of resource available online.

Spring Integration and Tibco were evaluated ,considering the following parameters we chose Oracle SOA suite becaue -

• Wide Range of Integration adapters compared to others
• Less time to market
• GUI based IDEBetter resource pool - there are more people in the market with Oracle skills
• Most clients prefer Oracle products as they were already using other products particularly E-Business Suite

Go for Oracle SOA Suite if you have complex integration scenarios or there is a need to service your legacy systems. Never implement a business functionality in Oracle SOA suite and it has to be purely used for VETRO (Validation, Enrichment, Transformation, Routing, and Orchestration). It is not recommended for start ups to build their IT infrastructure.

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 primarily use this product for integrating with Salesforce and SaaS applications that our company uses for quality. We also have other legacy applications, and now, we are integrating the tool with our internal applications. We are also using Oracle B2B, which is part of SOA.

The most valuable features are the dashboard and audit trail

They have a good auditing feature.

It offers end-to-end Java support and JavaScript support. In case there is something that doesn't work out of the box, you have the flexibility to customize it.

There are networking and firewall issues that tend to delay our projects. I believe that is the case with any middleware.

The documentation and details can be a little better, and more user-friendly. They supply lots of documentation but finding what we need is challenging at times.

There is room for improvement in terms of support.

In the next version of this solution, I would like to see improvements made to the test environment for real-time testing. There is a lot of new software that isn't there until you deploy, which means that you cannot test real-time.

We have been using the Oracle SOA Suite for three years.

It has been stable for us, so far.

We do not have many integrations. We have a very small team and we have four or five consultants working for us. Together with a couple of people in our organization, there are six or seven people who have access to manage.

The technical support from Oracle is good, although it can be better.

The initial setup is not very complex.

Our scenario is different. We do not have write access in our production environment, so we have to depend on Oracle Managed Services. Because they have to make the changes, it gets a little bit delayed. If we had the write permissions then it wouldn't be an issue.

Our in-house team deployed it. 

When I began working with this product three years ago, the company already had Oracle EBS and other Oracle software that was already in use. We recently evaluated other products but we thought it was the best option to go with Oracle.

One of the reasons is that there is a lot of code involved, and we would have had to write everything into the new software.

This is a good product and I can recommend it to others. That said, there are a lot of new products that are coming onto the market, including open-source solutions. If people are starting from scratch then I would recommend evaluating several of them.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Nowadays I work for a retail company, and we deliver SOA Suíte 12c to integrate SAP Hybris REST API with legacy systems. Before, I used to work for a telecom company, and we used OSB and BPEL to integrate IVR with legacy systems.

SAP Hybris e-commerce needed to access orders, customers, inventory and products data on SQL server database. We developed a REST API using BPEL and OSB. We also use BPEL to integrate Oracle Retail V14 to legacy systems.

• SOAP and REST services implemented with BPEL
• Database/JMS/file adapters and authentication policies
• Proxy, business services and pipelines of Oracle Service Bus.

The product is very good considering tracing, ease of use and troubleshooting.

However, the development environment requires a big machine with potent CPU/memory, and SOA server takes many minutes to be up, you can't run anything else on the computer.

In production, when you have lots of composites running on the SOA server, it takes up to 30 min to restart the server.

Microservice was created to solve these weaknesses of standard SOA approach.

You need a qualified team to support production environments.

Good performance when using cluster environment.

yes, Mule ESB.

High price, now with Oracle cloud, there are more options of pricing.

The client already had the Oracle license.

Check also Oracle ICS and PCS on the cloud.

The most valuable feature is its capability to integrate with a wide variety of other solutions.

We have been able to automate a lot of manual processes for our invoicing.

I’d like to see more integration with Salesforce. That's one thing that I think they're still in the inception phase. I think a more robust solution for Salesforce would be good.

It’s pretty robust and stable.

One of the reasons why we went to Oracle SOA Suite is its ability to scale out to all the different platforms and technologies. I think it's doing pretty well. We have integrated with a couple vendors right now, and we plan to integrate another five or six in the pipeline.

Technical support has been pretty good. The Oracle support team has seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about the SOA Suite. They have provided proper support every time we've called.

We were not previously using any other solution. We evaluated this and a couple of other things, and when we did all the metrics and everything else, SOA Suite came out on top.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward, but we had one of the Platinum Partners come in and actually install it. They knew how to do it and there was pretty minimal involvement from us.

We thought about building a custom solution and also looked at Microsoft. We decided to go with Oracle SOA Suite just because it was already pre-built and it was mature enough that it had all the capabilities we were looking for.

When I’m looking for a vendor such as Oracle to work with, I evaluate product maturity and support highly.

Look at all the integration adapters that SOA Suite offers. If those are the integration points that you wish to integrate with, I think it's the right solution. If there are some that are still in development or whatever, such as the Salesforce one, then you should probably consider something else.

There's a little bit of room for improvement, as I’ve mentioned, on the Salesforce side. Other than that, I think it's doing what it's supposed to do.

It allows for our integrations with SOA Suite via the API, which we've found to be very agile. We're also able to start integrating through some web services through the ABS system.

We now have a place that allows our integration to happen, whether that's through the agile API running that process or by having our web team develop something that reaches back into the database to grab data. This is important because we often have customers who come to our website to inquire about their orders. But because we don't have to keep two sets of data, we're able to just reach into the database to find out where the data is about customers' orders.

While the product is technically good, my biggest complaint is that there's a lack of the ability to find good support in the IT community for it. This isn't an issue with Oracle support, but rather with finding someone who manages it and who knows what's going on with it. It doesn't seem to be the usual Oracle product that really takes a bit of skill in order to manage it correctly. There's a market for SOA Suite administrators that's separate from regular DBAs. So that's my biggest complaint -- finding the right community support for it.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

It runs fine without any huge stability issues. It's when we try to use it with certain packages that we are trying to do around the AIP that we had some issues.

We haven't really had to scale it because we're not using it that much yet. We may have plans in the future to.

SOA Suite setup was fine as it installs per their instructions. Our biggest issue we had was with our API integration from agile to EBS. It took us several months to get that up and running correctly, with a lot of escalated Oracle support around that. It was a tough nut to crack but we eventually got there.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

There are different products that can do the same thing. Evaluate your requirements and if you have big plans for integration with Oracle, give it some thought.

We use it as middleware to interface between our financial application, which is JD Edwards, and the database, as well as to legacy systems. It serves a critical functionality of linking the applications together to provide us the data we need.

The error reporting can be improved. When you get an email saying that something has gone wrong or something is not complete, it isn't very intuitive. It has to go to a very technical person to be able to tell you what actually the error is and what you need to know about it.

The company has been using the product for about two years.

I would say it is and is not a stable solution, not because of a fault in the product, but because we have a combination of legacy systems and also modern ERP systems. The challenge has been with information moving between the interfaces. When you send information, it's a black box. You don't get a confirmation that information has come back, so it's asynchronous, whereas our applications are synchronous. The ongoing challenge is knowing whether your data been sent completely and accurately. We've had to work to build very good reporting at least. The biggest challenge is getting useful information to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

So far, it has been a scalable solution. The next few years will be the true test of it, but so far, it has been a scalable solution.

Because it's a transformation project program over several years, we have internal and external support. Resources are from Accenture, the service integrator, working with Oracle Managed Cloud Services and ADM. So far, so good.

I wasn't directly involved in the setup. Nonetheless, I would say it's as straightforward as it can be considering our environment.

I think about process, not solutions. Determine what you really want to do first. Then, once you have clearly determined what you want to do, determine your requirements. Once you have the requirements, then go find the solution that meets those requirements. Rather than thinking of the solution and trying to look backwards; does it fit? Know what you really want and then go find the product. You will rarely find a product that gives you 100%, but you might find one that gives you 80% of what you need, so determine what you can live with and what you can't live without.

When I’m selecting a vendor to work with, I don’t want any bait and switch, in the sense of promise and delivery. The space that we are in, that's the biggest challenge. Sales people always get a bad rep as they offer promises and then when the product is delivered, they say something like, "The product doesn't do that or you need to buy something else to get that." I’m looking for simple clarity on what you're delivering, what it can and cannot do. That upfront clarity and honesty is what I look for the most.