Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

I think in my role, the most valuable feature of the product is the declarative way of orchestrating your web server engines instead of having to code it all manually.

Once it's in production, for the organization, I think the most valuable feature is it's the ability to track and trace every single message all the way from the beginning to the end.

We're Oracle partners, so we're implementing it for our customers. I think for them it means being able to reuse their current IT assets and having access to that information in their current systems. Another improvement to their organizations is reducing the time to market for building an integration.

It depends a little bit on the perspective. From my perspective, I think the development experience, the refactoring, could be improved. And the way that the design-side metadata storage is implemented.

I think from an organizational perspective, the audit options can be improved by making it easier in terms of business terms. A lot of the new features that they're implementing right now, I think will help that. It's not just technical, but also has more business semantics.

I think I've been using the product since 2007.

It is a stable product. Of course, it's an IT product, so sometimes there's versions that need patches, but the patches are being released regularly. In production, the product is extremely stable. I think sometimes the development tool could have issues, especially with new versions. The first version sometimes needs a patch, but the production environment has always been very stable.

It's an extremely scalable product. We have projects with very high throughput, and also there's a lot of tuning possibilities to make the messages extremely fast.

There are a lot of support resources available: Oracle support, forums, articles, blogs, and product management. We have a close relationship with product management, so we discuss solutions with them. There's the A-Team that can help out. In terms of technical support, there's a lot of possibilities. And then, of course, the partner ecosystem that we are a part of offers a few options, as well.

I think for a developer instance, it's straightforward. You can just follow the wizard and click Next, Next, Next. For production, it's quite complex. For every other element in your IT, because it's an integration product, so naturally it has complexity because you need network connectivity, you need to know what type of storage, you need high availability, and you need to tune it.

I think that one of the things that can ease that is automation of the installation. We use scripts for that, so we don't forget anything. Of course, the other option is the SOA Suite in the cloud. Oracle took away part of the complexity by offering the wizards in the cloud.

With traditional programming languages, you have to build a lot of the web servers and integration stuff manually, which is very error-prone and time-consuming. Compared to that, I think this product is a huge improvement.

I think if you compare it to competitors, it's very strong in the operation side of things because you can track and trace everything very easily, as well as the ease of use of integrations.

• Ease of development, the IDE (JDeveloper) is intuitive and well designed for developing SOA composites.
• The technology adapters which provide connectivity to messaging systems, databases, and file systems all enable you to quickly integrate these components into your composite.
• The product includes a well designed mediator (filtering, routing, transformation) component combined with a powerful BPEL engine all packaged as part of a SCA framework.

It has enabled quick development of integration interfaces between multiple systems (legacy and new). A proof of concept can be put together fairly rapidly.

The installation of the product is fairly cumbersome. The user interfaces for viewing data flows (consoles) seem to lag under load. Application server thread management can be improved.

The product is stable if implemented properly.

It would depend on who you reach in Support. Sometimes issues get resolved quickly and some other times there is a long back and forth. The Oracle Support Portal provides some useful pointers to common issues.

Installation is not a product strength as mentioned above. Depending on the components that you install and the scope of your project, things can get a bit complicated.

We implemented it with a mixed team. Read the documentation and Oracle Support portal notes. Design error handling and monitoring upfront. Decide on your underlying Database infrastructure based on data volume and anticipated load.

The organization has evaluated other products, but felt that this is a more mature middleware platform solution. It met many of our needs.

The only advice I can give is to just make sure that you are very familiar with the products and the services that they offer. Ensure there is someone involved who is familiar with the product and its features for the implementation of an Enterprise Software solution.

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.

• 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.