Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

I am using Oracle SOA Suite to do different web services. For example, web service Type SOAP and REST.

Oracle SOA Suite has been beneficial for my organization because it enables us to consume other services and access databases to transfer data. It also allows us to receive messages from web services and transform them into different formats, such as XML. This helps us to effectively integrate and exchange data between various systems and applications.

The Oracle SOA Suite has many useful features, and different organizations may place different emphases on the importance of each feature. Certain features are particularly important to the organization, such as the ability to access databases and transform messages, as well as the use of proxy services to secure web services with usernames and passwords. These features can be critical for enabling effective integration and data exchange between systems and applications.

Other solutions might be better componets such as Salesforce. 

I have been using Oracle SOA Suite for approximately six years.

The solution is stable.

The initial setup of the solution is easy because I have experience with it.

This is a good solution and you can use it with different web services. You have the flexibility to use other technologies. For example, PHP Web Services and Java Web Services.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Oracle SOA Suite a nine out of ten.

The product provides transparency in finances.

The product is not user-friendly. It is very complicated. It is very hard to get the reports.

I have been using the solution for one year.

I rate the tool’s stability a four out of ten. The stability could be improved.

The solution is moderately scalable. However, it is not effective. The solution must improve the scalability. Around 20 to 25 people use the solution in our organization.

The initial setup was complex. It was more of a brownfield. The deployment took one year.

We need technical support for the deployment. We needed three developers and two engineers to deploy the tool.

The ROI was okay. Our customers have not dealt with other competitors’ products. Hence, they are okay with the solution.

I will not recommend Oracle to others. Overall, I rate the product a three or four out of ten.

We are using Oracle SOA Suite for integration for both our internal and external systems. For the internal systems, we use a gateway to connect to it, and for the third party connections. We use Oracle SOA Suite for orchestration, transformation, and translation.

In Oracle SOA Suite some applications are not able to use REST, but it can support both SOAP and REST. You're able to integrate quite a lot of systems, which may not be able to in other solutions. You can also use XML and JSON. It is a standardizing type of tool. It doesn't matter whether I'm using JSON or XML, it can convert them.

After starting to use this solution your time to take products to production becomes a bit faster. I've learned to embrace new technologies and to take the opportunity to learn and make use of the new technologies that are there. For example, if you can reuse an API or a service, then it saves you a lot of development time and makes the teams deliver much faster.

Overall the solution is quite versatile.

The resiliency of this application can have problems with a downstream system., sometimes it's unable to recover quickly. You have to restart the services. However, this is most likely because I'm using an old version, which is 12.1.3, but if I upgrade to 12.2, then that will problem will be resolved. I'm in the process of thinking of upgrading it.

I have been using Oracle SOA Suite for approximately seven years.

Oracle SOA Suite is stable as long as you do the correct installation, with the architecture. It's good and very stable. I have quite a lot of services that run using it.

The solution is highly scalable because I'm using three nodes, three physical nodes, or virtual machines, and if I want to add a fourth one, I can add it very easily. You can add more nodes and more managed servers. We call them managed servers, without any downtime. We have more than one node, and maintenance becomes very easy. If your architecture is done well everything will work perfectly. For example, installing the solution on at least two nodes for higher availability is scalable.

We have approximately 300 services running and the number of users can vary. The user count can vary because different applications can call the same service, we reuse these services. For example, at any one time, we could have approximately 50,000 messages passing through in about 10 minutes every ten minutes.

The technical support is good, we have premier support which costs extra.

We previously have not used another similar solution.

The installation can be straightforward if you follow the right guidance from Oracle. The infrastructure needs to be properly done.

The full implementation took use approximately one year, but it was because we have a  disaster recovery(DR) site also. We had to install it on both sides. We installed it on the DR site, used it, then copied it onto the DC site, the goal was for it to be faster.

We used Oracle consulting services for the implementation, they are very good.

We have at least four infrastructure engineers working on the support of the solution because you need people shadowing each other. Four should be good.

You will need an infrastructure person because it runs on WebLogic. Another person who can set up the infrastructure, and someone else who can work on the Oracle SOA Suite, which involves many services. Your security team needs to get involved too, they are part of this project. However, there are only two main technical people involved, infrastructure and product person.

We have evaluated other options.

I would recommend others to use Oracle SOA Suite, it's a great product. Now that we have the cloud solution, if your other products are in the cloud, then you can implement the cloud-based version. Most of my applications are on-premise, and that is why I am using the on-premise version. I would recommend the solution to anyone who wants stable, scalable, very versatile, and resilient, integration software.

I rate Oracle SOA Suite an eight out of ten.

We position Oracle SOA Suite as the central on-premises integration platform, to integrate existing on-premises systems with each other. Furthermore, it is used in upcoming hybrid architectures, where Cloud-based systems and Cloud-native apps, need to be integrated with the existing on-premises applications.

The product allows you to visualize how a company is working currently by providing rich possibilities for analysis such as the audit trails and therefore shows where improvements might be valuable. This becomes more and more important for companies to differentiate themselves from competitors.

A definitive differentiator is the very good integration capability the platform provides: It has a broad spectrum of connectivity adapters to integrate with third party enterprise information systems, like SAP, Siebel, and JD Edwards, and also cloud solutions like Salesforce.

In addition, the platform comes with a standalone, first-class Service Bus component that can be used for service virtualization. This enables customers to create and edit new integrations efficiently and helps to adopt new trends or concepts, like cloud, very fast.

Aside from that, the platform also addresses business needs (process automation with BPEL), allows to further transparency for business transactions (audit trails, Business Activity Monitoring) and provides rich capabilities in the direction of fault handling and resiliency.

EDIT: In the newest version (12.2.1.1), Real-Time Integration Business Insight is directly included. Isights allows to declaratively define monitoring milestones for complete business process flows, without touching the implementation. The declared monitoring model can be adjusted at any time at runtime and the data can be displayed in different ways using different dashboard components. Another great thing to achieve more visibility regarding how business is performing.

The Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which is JDeveloper in this case. Also, the integrated development environment could be better in some points such as the stability and the comprehensibility of errors.

EDIT: The Maven integration in JDeveloper is very basic and might be enhanced to allow the proper use of Maven.

There have been no issues aside from the local development environment.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The level of technical support is satisfactory, but it depends highly on the affected components and on the way the error can be described and what information can be provided, e.g. by providing a reproducer or a detailed error log.

There is also a lot of documentation. In addition, the development community is also responsive and provides a lot of information in the form of blog posts, webcasts, and presentations.

There was nothing in place previously.

The initial setup is neither straightforward nor complex. It always depends on the specific situation, like the available IT system landscape, the already existing applications, and the needs of a project.

The platform as such can be installed following best practices provided by the vendor, such as the Enterprise Deployment Guide. Oracle partners also provide tools that support you in infrastructure setup and maintenance.

It is necessary to evaluate the requirement regarding the platform usage and what the main operation area of the platform will be. Because depending on that, the initial sizing of the infrastructure has to be done. Typical questions are:

• How many instances do you expect per day/month/year?
• What is the average amount of data?
• Should the environment have High Availability?
• What kind of integrations/processes will you have - stateless or stateful, long running processes derived from the requirements, and evaluated at the very beginning?

A topology blueprint should be created and validated against these requirements.

No other options have been evaluated.

Collect your requirements and be clear with what you need. Before starting a concrete project or even before doing the final sizing, talk with others who have already implemented the solution or have reliable experience in this area. This will help you to get things right from the beginning and help you to avoid running into pitfalls. Do not undersize the environment and always keep in mind what will come in the future.

The product can be used to build a company's robust foundation regarding a enterprise-wide integration platform without hesitation, which we already did in different project contexts. Because the platform helps to solve complex problems, it is complex itself and so not that easy to understand and to learn. The learning curve is high accordingly.

EDIT: To ensure robustness and easy changeability of the developed services and components, my recommendation is to set up a Continuous Integration (CI) environment as a first step in every project. The CI environment is the central platform for automated test executions as well as for deployment automation and is - from my point of view - absolutely needed to succeed with complex integration implementations.

• 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.

The most valuable features for us are the integration with Oracle Fusion middleware products and the native support.

Bringing all the data to central warehouse and generating reports that helps business to forecast business strategy is one of the most useful features.

We have manual sales order processing for customers and book new PO to supplier. Using Oracle forecasting tools and SOA Suite we have integrated our Order Management System and Forecasting System. BI reports helps business users to generate report and raise PO accordingly to fill the demand supply gap.

I'd like to see more plug-and-play adapters, preferably similar to Cloud Integration's browser-based adapter. It saves time to cope with the ever growing business and to meet requirements in more a more agile manner.

We've been using it for the last eight years. Alongside SOA Suite, we're using Oracle AIA 11.1.1.7, ODI 11.1.1.7, OBIEE 11.1.1.9, Oracle Data Quality, OER, OSR, PeopleSoft, Oracle Applications 12R, Deloitte and Accenture are our implementation partners.

We have always seen issues around integration tools and it's difficult to resolve issues sometimes when things pile up.

We've had no issues with stability.

An effective alert mechanism needs to be put in place for deployment and to help scale environments.

Existing bugs have been identified proactively. However, in several SRs, we have seen intermittent delays for new products.

Our older systems were IBM Mainframe and SeeBeyond Solutions for integration between other systems. We have chosen the product from the stability and brand value.

The installation was very straightforward. We have encountered issues in the production environment for missing several configuration where we spent more time in streamlining all the environments.

We hired Oracle for a few of our implementations when we were setting up our in-house team. We began implementing with vendors and later on formed an internal team with knowledge transition. If you're a company that does not have COE in the areas that you are implementing, it's advisable to consult the vendor team for industry experts and gradually move the technology over.

Oracle does offer a competitive licensing price if you are purchasing a suite of products from them to maximize the ROI. However, if anyone chooses selective products from the stack, the percentage of ROI is less.

In our enterprise, we have a mix of products and each product helps the business in different ways. It's advisable to measure the business needs first and then plan for the implementation, because once implementation starts with an older version by the time it stabilizes, the stack needs to be upgraded. Oracle product upgrades are not very straightforward. Sometimes there is a slight unwillingness from the stakeholders to stay on the updated version rather than continuing with the existing.

Our primary use case for the solution is an enterprise integration solution. However, it depends on the business needs. For example, in the telecom domain, it involves connecting multiple systems, sending the data from one system to another, getting the data, and synchronizing it between various systems. Currently, we use the solution to implement integrations. For example, if we need to connect an HCM SaaS solution to an ADP application, PeopleSoft, or Salesforce application, we use the tool for the integrations.

The stability of the solution is the most valuable feature for us because when we initially started working with the solution, it was not stable. However, when Oracle acquired this product in 10G and moved it to 11C, we used to create a lot of Oracle support tickets. But as the product has matured, we're confident that we are getting a good integration solution. Currently, the solution is stable, and we hardly see any issues with it, and the issues we do see are easy for us to resolve without support.

The solution can be improved by creating a lightweight product that can provide persistence features. Additionally, they can include function upgrades in the next release that will offer custom functions like a zip file and encoding.

We have been using the solution for approximately twelve years.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a seven out of ten, and six people currently use the solution in our organization.

The solution is stable. It is very unlikely that you will face any product issues or see any unwanted exceptions. I rate the stability as nine out of ten.

I rate customer service and support a six out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We implemented the solution in-house.

Advice on pricing and licensing will differ from one organization to another and their business needs. I rate the pricing for this solution a seven out of ten.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten because it is one of the best and most global products available on the market. The product is good, but its function options can be improved.

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.