Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

With relation to integrations, we have a few cloud solutions. We have Salesforce which we need to connect to. We have Taleo, an Oracle recruiting tool. So to connect to both of those, we try to use the SOA Suite.

The SOA Suite is a very reliable solution. We have a clustered environment, like in our production instance. So even if one of the services, or one of the clusters goes down, we still have the other cluster remaining up. So we are very happy with the SOA Suite.

Right now, we plan to go into the 12C version of it, at this point, we're doing a side-by-side upgrade. We like a few features of the 12C version which we are coming up with. The Salesforce adapter, which comes along with it, and as we keep growing and want to add more services, we will be looking at the new features which are available in 12C.

As of right now, currently we do not have too many composites. We have probably around 20 composites in each instance. We have three different domains. If we need to scale it higher, we should be able to do that pretty nicely.

We haven't encountered too much trouble, architecturally, as an issue. What we have had is developer issues, but we have our partner who takes of that. So we had them create the Oracle SR and take care of it.

We keep wanting to be at the top of the industry level. So that's the reason we keep going to the latest solutions available, and Fusion Middlware is one of them.

We had another partner, because we had no idea about SOA Suite. So we had another offshore vendor who helped us do the initial configuration, sessions of going through the architecture sessions and now we have become comfortable with it.

At this point, since we are now an Oracle shop, we were only looking at the Oracle SOA Suite. And we had to integrate a SOA gateway as part of EBS, but that wasn't an entire solution for our SOA needs. But SOA Suite provides us with that, and that's how we went there.

I would rate it an 8. The reason being, I didn't want to give it a higher rating is because it's a little bit complex. It takes a little bit of time to get used to it, and to figure out and find the actual developers who can work on the solution. Like the processes and stuff. And that's basically why I would rate it a 8.

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.

Service orchestration using BPEL and OSB is the feature most used. JMS integration for reliable messaging is probably the most valuable feature.

Pub/Sub is an integration pattern very commonly used. SOA/WebLogic provides easy-to-use JMS services that can be used in BPEL or OSB. This is the only way to guarantee the delivery of messages. Any message that needs guaranteed delivery has to go over JMS.

The product allows loose coupling between applications. We no longer use point-to-point integration or tightly coupled integration. This provides reusability of services and ease of integration.

In the previous 11g release, there wasn't any straightforward support for calling or exposing REST services with JSON payloads. REST support was released with version 12c (12.1.3 to be specific). With this version, a REST adapter was introduced, which can be used for calling REST services or exposing OSB or BPEL as a REST service. Embedded JavaScript inside BPEL was another new feature to help work with REST/JSON services. It was all good, but using them is not very straightforward. There's no proper documentation or tutorial for embedding JavaScript.

We have been using this solution for about seven years now. We started with version 11.1.1.4.

A new deployment or proper deployment takes a lot of time, planning and researching. Once you get your topology right, then scaling the infrastructure is not a big issue. Again, the documentation needs to be more specific about the things you need to keep in mind when starting with a new deployment.

I would rate it no more than 2.5/5. This is where they need to really improve the turnaround time. Issues usually take a bit of time to resolve. It's not an ideal scenario if you have a production issue.

We have used some parts of TIBCO BusinessWorks before. We did evaluate some other products and looked at Gartner, etc. Based on our experience and customer relations with Oracle, we decided to go with it.

Initial setup in the previous version was quite complex. It has improved a lot in the 12c version. Still, you need to configure quite a few things before you get it right. Some of the things are not easy to configure. Also, there are number of places where configuration is required and that makes it a bit tricky.

I will skip ROI. About pricing, if you have a good relationship with Oracle, it helps.

We are happy with the product. If someone is looking to implement it, they should really look to get their infrastructure right before you start implementing services.

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.

The best feature is that it's one integrated product and very supportive of different technologies, so it supports the best-standard products such as SOA, BPM, and PeopleSoft. These are industry standards, not just Oracle standards. Once you deploy and build solutions on top of it, you have stability. So if you move away from Oracle, you can reuse a lot of the integration and the thought that was behind it. The second part is it has support for an amazing number of technologies as well as business adapters, so it can make your integration very easy and seamless.

If I have to be very precise, I would say that is one of the best integration platforms in terms of the fact that it has support from pretty much every technology as well as business connections available. For instance, imagine if you want to connect your EBS with Salesforce. You can do it through SOA Suite using all those adapters. Similarly, if you're to connect your Salesforce with any other hundred million cloud-based apps, you can do all of it using out-of-the-box cloud adapters that SOA Suite provides.

The product is very capable, it has a lot of features, but that makes it very complex to manage, maintain, install, patch, and monitor. Since we are moving into an age of DevOps and smart automation I'd like Oracle to invest in ways where it can improve the developer productivity and the way our infrastructure can be managed, self-healed, self-monitored, and give you indications of where the lights are on or off. There are different products at the moment, but that means integrating with those products again. If you step into that thing, you have to buy five different products from Oracle and include them all together to have this functionality achieved. If it's such a good platform for middleware, it should have those features as well.

The platform historically has had stability issues with every new release. The platform moved from 10g to 11g, had around seven releases in 11g, then moved to 12c, with a further five releases in 12c. These issues are then addressed through a lot of patches and patch sets, and that's a problem with the platform. A lot of times it's a combination of a platform and an application which can cause stability issues. We've seen a lot of stability issues with Oracle Server Suite when they release new versions.

SOA Suite is not so much for the number of users. It's for the number of integrations that you process, as the metric is different. You don't use SOA Suite with end users in mind, as it's an integration platform. It has support for a wide number of applications from legacy mainframes to modern ones such as Salesforce.

SOA Suite is a bit challenging. SOA Suite has a lot of products inside it but they're all bundled together. You have the option of bundling them all together when you're installing and then adding additional components once you've installed. That process is straightforward, but it is very complicated. It is straightforward for demos, but when it comes to enterprise-grade deployment, it is very complicated.

With a lot of cloud applications coming in, the dimensions of integration is changing. Integration is not just between systems on premise, but it is also between systems on-premise and in the cloud. And, again between systems within the cloud. So WebLogic, and SOA Suite together are not sufficient to handle all these integrations. It has been proven to support integration which are on-premise to cloud, and then cloud-to-cloud integration, so the dimensions of integration are changing. Invest in how you would use SOA Suite over other cloud-based integration suites such as ICS and have a clear strategy about when do you use which integration platform.

I am using Oracle SOA Suite for integration purposes.

The most valuable feature of Oracle SOA Suite is all the platform's capabilities.

The solutions can improve the communication or translations between formats, such as JSON and XML. The JSON REST API could improve.

I have been using Oracle SOA Suite for approximately 10 years.

Oracle SOA Suite is stable.

This solution is scalable if it is designed well.

Three people are using the solution.

The support is decent.

I rate the price of Oracle SOA Suite a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have WSO2 and Microsft Bistock before they stopped production.

This is a good solution and I would recommend it to others.

I rate Oracle SOA Suite a nine out of ten.

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.