Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

• The technology adapters (Database, REST, LDAP, File, many more), which allow easy integration with technologically diverse systems.
• BPEL and Service Bus, which allow diverse integration patterns to be easily implemented.
• The extensive Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control which provides management and monitoring capabilities.
• The high availability features (mostly important for performance and stability).

Since the SOA Suite provides many components, it is an extensive toolkit for a developer, who can, with relatively little coding, quickly achieve complex functionality.

We implement SOA Suite at different customers. The product helps them achieve their goals in terms of integration requirements (functional and non-functional). This ranges from service-enabling legacy systems to integrating COTS products in a stable, performant, and manageable way. Currently, I work for a customer that is digitalizing a legal processes. At this customer we implement reusable services and processes used by multiple front- and backend applications.

Managing (infrastructure) database growth and performance tuning can be a challenge. The product provides many options for implementing integrations, which is a strength, but sometimes it is also a challenge choosing the best solution.

I used 10g for three years, 11g for six years, and 12c for one year.

We've had no issues with deployment.

I have not encountered many stability issues caused by the product, but sometimes there are issues from poor implementation or maintenance.

Only when the customer did not follow recommendations from the provided Enterprise Deployment Guide were there scalability issues. The new version 12.2.2 is expected to provide multi-tenancy for SOA Suite, which improves this even further.

Technical support is good. I, however, do not often need support; I'm used to fixing things myself as a technical consultant.

I don't have much experience with comparable products. Have seen some things of Mule and TIBCO, but would not be able to provide an unbiased comparison. I think it would also be difficult since the SOA Suite is comprised of many components.

Initial environment setup can be complex (this is different for the SOA Suite Cloud Service where provisioning is largely automated). There are many steps to perform and choices to make. Also, the installation is layered. You require a supported OS, the application server needs to be installed on top, the database needs to be prepared, and the SOA Suite must be installed in the application server. There are other components like load balancers, HTTP servers, etc. which might need to be configured. High Availability is supported on all layers and multi-tenancy on almost all layers, but you need to think about how you are going to implement this.

Oracle SOA Suite is not the cheapest product suite around, but it has many features by default which you will probably need to create, manage, and maintain yourself when implementing other products (High Availability, monitoring, management, and alerting, for example). For a small company, you might not want to pay for a lot of features you might not use. Be a bit careful when implementing SOA Suite on virtualization platforms when licenses are concerned. Also, named users and unlimited license agreements require thought.

I have not done product comparisons. Also, I’m not in a role to choose a product for an implementation.

Choose the right tool for the job. Think carefully about selecting an implementation partner. Preferably choose one who has a proven track record, a good relationship with the product vendor, and who will help you achieve your goals with this product.

It's a good suite of products designed to implement an SOA architecture. In this sense, OSB is for us the best product in the suite, providing us a tool to integrate our components with a high level of stability that's easy to use.

Using OSB, we can have now a single point of access for all our systems, including legacy solutions. Using Event Processing, we can manage a high amount of data in real-time, detecting patterns.

Indeed BAM needs improvement. Its level of maturity is far below the rest of the product. In version 12c, it's unusable. It doesn't do what it's suppose to do (collect and show KPIs).

We have been using OSB for three years, BPEL and other products for only one year.

There have been no issues deploying it.

We had issues with BAM. We couldn't get it to work. Right now, we are looking for other solutions, as it's clear for us that in 12c BAM is not usable at all.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs except with BAM.

As with other big software companies, if you don't escalate and put pressure, you are not attended to in time.

It was medium. The initial setup is not very complex, but you need specific skills to do it right.

We implemented it using a third-party team of integrators.

We evaluated Open Source solutions and chose Oracle SOA Suite because it has a lot of products inside and due to the experience of other known companies.

Some products like OSB and BPEL engine can be rated 9/10, but some others like BAM are indeed below 3 or 4/10 due to their immaturity.

My best advice is to be careful with reporting using BAM. If you need real-time reporting, you will have to use other solutions.

• The integration with various products
• Seamless integration

It helped in the transfer of data from one system to another.

The web services need to be more robust. Also, the error handling should be improved.

More than four years.

We had several issues.

Most of the time.

Yes.

A four out of 10.

A four out of 10.

No.

The initial setup was complex without proper documentation.

A vendor team did the installation.

Not applicable.

No.

We use two components within SOA suite:

• Oracle Service Bus
• Oracle SOA Suite (BPEL)

It covers all uses for services with and without states. This solution is an Enterprise Service Bus for company strategy with all the expected features

• Scalabity
• Robustness
• Performance
• Cache
• Administration.

Its strength is its consistency and compliance with the Java Enterprise Edition standard and the underlying application servers.

The bus virtualizes services with OSB (Oracle Service Bus) as it guarantees a secure and holding performance with throttling downstream. It allows us to hide systems like SAP, AS400 and more modern systems.

SOA Suite takes over the services with states or necessitates fine tracking offered in combination with Enterprise Manager.

This version supports Maven for the first time. Some features need to be added for a complete support. A system trace for Oracle support would be useful.

We've been using this version since 2015.

Some customers mix concepts services with and without states. The state management in the BPEL engine of SOA Suite requires persistence in DB and reduces the expected performance. It is very important to activate it when needs dictate.

It's been stable during the time we've been using it.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The quality of support is not always equivalent. In general, it must improve.

The initial setup has been improved with this version 12.1. Development environments are autonomous and faster to use and to deploy.

However, the Oracle solution is based on a JEE architecture which teams must mastered. Otherwise the length of growing competence is long.

I attend implementations at customers with their teams. Their feedback is that during deployment, it has

• Robustness
• Performance
• Rich functionality

The largest customer has more than four million hits a day on its Oracle SOA Suite infrastructure.

I compared this solution to others. The Oracle SOA Suite solution respects Java bases with WebLogic. It allows us to build ESB and BPEL solutions on known technologies and mastered by systems teams. It has a corporate problem as its capacity for scalability, robustness and orchestration require a dedicated infrastructure base. I suggest other solutions to my clients based on their needs.

It is a very good ESB if your team has JEE knowledge.

Oracle SOA 12c comes with many new features mostly for developers to deliver integrations rapidly.

Saving the BPEL. The activities as templates is the most common use case I have used whilst in development. This enables us to adhere to corporate standard for developing integrations. Unlike SOA 11g where we used to copy paste code, SOA12c templates makes it easy for developers.

The Managed File Transfer (MFT) is a great addition to the product set managing all our file transfer capability, encryption, decryption, monitoring, visibility and resubmission of transfer. It integrates with SOA Suite seamlessly.

For Oracle Service Bus, there is no more Eclipse and only a single JDeveloper for all development and EM consoles for monitoring.

REST support for both SOA and OSB greatly enhance the product capability for mobile and cloud integration. Inbuilt continuous integration capability through JDeveloper. It has more adapter support for cloud integration than before.

For one of the customer where an on-premise application needed to be integrated with cloud, the integration is done using SOA Suite, reducing the development time due to the use of templates. Also, MFT handles all kinds of secure file exchange reducing the cost for having and managing multiple FTP servers. The same templates are used for other customers too reducing further our development time and delivering quality product.

For REST support, the product internally converts to a SOAP WSDL format, and I would like to see the product only work to REST standards. It would be nice if we could rename a SOA composite feature and have pre-built templates with best practises implemented.

I've been using it for the last seven years, and 12c for the last 10 months.

We have encountered no issues with its stability.

It’s a scalable application.

I have never used any other product.

For trying out a developer edition, the installation was easy unlike previous versions. The automatic upgrade from 11g to 12c was not painful.

We implemented it on our own.

You should use the new MFT, templates, REST features, and cloud adapters to get the best out of it.

• Easy-to-use development environment/maintenance consoles
• Default connectors for third-party integration
• Out-of-the-box deployment functionality

I can deliver higher quality customer solutions and support them both on the architectural level and the technical/implementation level.

Framework extensibility needs to be worked on.

I've been using it for eight years give or take.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Speed/memory consumption on processing of large (XML) documents did have some issues.

We had no issues scaling it.

7/10

We previously used Mule ESB/WSO2. Most of the time, the customer already has an Oracle background, so the implementation of the Oracle middleware was more of a logical extension.

Most of the time, it's straightforward for the integration patterns, and isn't rocket science.

Compared to open source platforms, Oracle isn't cheap. Companies will need to decide if they prefer open source, use, for example, a paid community support and use a framework which may be less mature, or use Oracle, which means a real mature framework, full support, and stability.

When customers are at the beginning of the process of deciding which middleware platform to use and they aren't bound to, let's say, Oracle, the choice to use, for example Oracle SOA Suite won't be the first one.

The Oracle integration platforms keeps getting expanded with more products. Overall, it's a mature and complete platform, ideal for implementing high-quality business solutions. Oracle has a real wide community which can help with almost any use case. It has an easy-to-use development environment. It's just a complete all-in-one solution.

The following features of this product are the most valuable to me:

Integration to underlying applications and technologies via its OOTB adapters
Scalability of deployed solutions
Business Process Management (BPM)
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

For my most recent customer, we automated an accounts payable process that integrated four different ERPs into an approval process.

Customers experience issues standing up environments. Unless an experienced administrator is involved, having an environment that is clustered and load balanced requires quite a bit of time. There are third-party tools to automate this configuration, but there is nothing currently out of the box to ease difficulty the installation issues customers run into.

I have used this solution for 8+ years.

SOA has been stable through the years, other portions of the suite have had issues when they rolled out. Customer support is very responsive when issues are found and the product is stable.

Scalability is one of the strengths of the product. We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I know others with issues, but our experience has been that they have been outstanding. Escalations are handled timely and the expertise of the support techs we've been assigned has been outstanding.

I did not previously use a different solution. We works exclusively with Oracle SOA Suite.

This is a complex environment so unless an experienced administrator is involved, having an environment that is clustered and load balanced requires quite a bit of time. There are third-party tools to automate this configuration, but there is nothing currently out of the box to ease difficulty the installation issues customers run into.

The vendor team was not used. Full disclosure - I work for a consulting company and we were brought in to facilitate the BPM and integration aspects of the project.

Get training up front. Hire an experienced administrator. Bring in experienced consultants to help on the initial project to help mentor and provide best practices.

• Reusability of services
• Scalability

We have implemented SOA for many clients. The organizations are getting benefit as they are eliminating complex integration (point to point) among several legacy systems, and having a low cost solution. The reusability of services is a game changer because one of our clients is saving big money by eliminating extraneous legacy systems.

There is a dashboard available in SOA Suite, and it's called BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), however, very often, clients need more customization, and this is limited. I want more customization in BAM.

I've been using it for two years.

There are many issues in deployment, and it is an ongoing process of improvement in any product. We get support from Oracle to resolve these issues.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

There is a good customer support available and it depend on the severity of the issue.

Initial setup is straightforward and there is plenty of documentation available on the Oracle website to help you with it.

We have an in-house team that did it.

It is always good if there is a win-win situation for client and service providers, and there is definitely some room for improvement in this area.

There are many factors that meant we chose this product over others, including its low cost, variety of integration options, and virtualization through Oracle Service Bus.

Perform a proper requirement gathering and check where this product is best suited in your organization.