Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

The most valuable features are BPEL orchestrations, mediations and tight integration with Oracle Service Bus, and adapters.

A very useful feature in SOA Suite 12c has been REST adapters, which have now been upgraded so that there is no explicit need to translate REST and JSON on in/outbound.

Also, BPEL extensions and templates have been very useful.

SOA Suite 12c can significantly simplify the integrations and orchestration, including human workflow. In complex IT environments, it can lead to loosely-coupled architecture and reduce the integration complexity considerably. Also, it can contribute to service reuse.

In my opinion, an important aspect that will probably be covered in future versions is support for micro-services and the ability to scale on PaaS and Docker-like environments.

I have used this product since it was introduced as BPEL Process Manager 10g. For 12c, I was among the beta testers.

We've had no issues with deployment.

SOA Suite 12c has improved stability considerably. In the past, we had encountered some minor stability issues with WSM. However, in 12c this has been greatly improved and we have not noticed major problems in production. Also, JDeveloper has been improved.

12c has improved scalability dramatically and now uses fewer server resources. Also, Enterprise Manager provides better tools to monitor load.

We have always gotten prompt and useful responses from support.

No, however we also have experience with IBM BPM. We, however, prefer Oracle SOA Suite due to better integration and richer functionalities.

Setup is straightforward, particularly for development environments. For production and separate domains, you need to know what you are doing. However, the provided documentation is adequate.

We have evaluated IBM BPM, JBoss jBPM, and Activiti. We have figured out that SOA Suite 12c currently offers the richest functionalities and is the best integrated product.

It is essential to have a good understanding of the features provided, including BPEL, services, adapters, mediations, human workflow and other features. It is also good to get familiar with SOA concepts and patterns. Using this product is the right way to go and following sound development practices brings results quickly. However, using the product in wrong way might not provide all the benefits.

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.

I guess connecting to any and every application. Different sources: it can be a file source, a database, a web service. It's a single source for integration.

I think it has already improved quite a bit. At the system level, when you are running a website, it should be easier to diagnose the source of problems, for example, why the CPU is high, and make the error logs and log files easier to work with to find why an issue happens. Sometimes the Java can be a bit tricky to diagnose the actual problem. I think probably this area can be improved.

I started in 2010, so for over six years now.

It's stable enough. It has its problems as with any other Java application. Java, you know, sometimes can go down; JVM crashes; it has stuck threads. So as with any Java applications, it has its fair share of minor issues; but it's getting better.

It is scalable.

The technical support was average. It's a complex product, so it really takes time before you can find someone who knows, or someone who can get the right answer that we are looking for, and sometimes you don't, even if it takes ages.

If you know it, it's straight forward. If you don't know it, it's rather complex and can be very tricky. If you haven't invested time, you will make mistakes. Then it is not very simple to get back and start again.

If you want to invest in this product, I recommend to go ahead and do it. If someone is starting ,start with the latest version. It version is a lot better than it used to be. Don't even look back at the old version.

The Service Bus is a solid tool with native throttling out of the box capabilities. Using this feature one can ensure that at any point an application getting "rogue" will not overrun the capabilities of the main back end and by doing so endanger the entire IT landscape of the organization. With careful planning and performance benchmarking, you can ensure the applications are used at full capacity and not pass the critical load point. Another good feature was the introduction of the Composite Application Architecture which I believe it simplifies the entire development lifecycle.

This application impacts upon the overall architecture and directly influences directly the governance within the organisation. From my experience, having a middleware solution implemented, allows the organisation to organically move into a more disciplined development style where the application data ownership is far better respected than before.

I would like to have a cloud version available with virtualization capabilities which will reduce the implementation turnaround time.

I've been using it for seven years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had issues with the early versions but lately the product is performing well.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Oracle is providing good support for this tool.

I have used other middleware applications before and I also evaluated a few. The recommendation for using one tool versus another is usually based on the entire IT landscape, the maturity of the organisation, and the complexity of the entire implementation.

The initial implementation has improved a lot with the latest version. It used to be a more complex activity in the past, while with the latest version the installation is smooth and more straightforward.

I have been on both sides of the fence. It is important to leverage the experience of an implementer who can bring the know-how and protect the organization from making mistakes that can prove to be very costly in the future. If the budget allows try to learn from the mistakes which were done by others before you.

Done right you can see an impact pretty fast. It is always a good idea to package it with other Oracle products in order to take advantage from the discounted rates. Your Oracle Sales Manager should be able to advice what is the best way to have the maximum savings.

Plan carefully and make sure that the SOA is part of the vision of your enterprise. The last thing you want is to make it an "after thought" which can prove itself to be a risk on its own and very intrusive in nature.

The features of this product that are most valuable to me are the dashboard creation ability of BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) product. Also the flexibility of using the JDeveloper development tool for web service and Oracle Service Bus development.

One example of how this product has improved my organization functions is in the shortening of the development time to market in delivering custom solutions. Another example is in the technical agility and flexibility to adapt to business process change that happens at a very fast pace in companies daily.

One area for improvement that I would like to see change in the next release is in the JDeveloper toolset. Occasionally, when you have open to many windows the tool acts erratic and has memory leaks.

I have used this solution since 2010-2011 for various companies. Also across different industries I have been successful to develop and implement solutions using this toolset.

One of the main issues is figuring out how to do what you want in the toolset.
The documentation occasionally misses steps. OSB development can get tricky

I have encountered the occasional JDeveloper memory leak.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Oracle customer service is very helpful. The website is full of on demand tutorials and documentation.

The Initial setup of the product is straightforward as long as you do your pre-planning and follow the prerequisites. Also, occasionally you encounter an issue that requires that a ticket be created with support or independent research must be done to resolve the issue (i.e. search the web or read blogs for missing steps.)

I have implemented the solution as a mixed implementation between vendor resources and in house. This model has been used at all my implementations across industries. My advice would be to identify your pre-requisites and also hold pre-planning meetings to identify business and technical requirements.

I have previously investigated other products in the quadrant and I choose to align myself with the Oracle SOA Suite. This is due to the robust features available and the scalability of the product suite.

My advice for people looking to implement this product is that training is a must.
You have to make that investment in your in-house resources to be successful in supporting the product. If they fix the memory leak issues with JDeveloper toolset and make the training needed less intensive I would give it a 10/10.

Conceptually, how it integrates a lot of essential enterprise process components. That's the most valuable.

It consolidates various other software applications into the one solution.

The interface is too complicated. Making modifications still requires too much technical knowledge. The user interface needs to be less technical so that business analysts can utilize or develop their process, design their process more easily, without technical knowledge of how SOA Suite works.

We're using it for a minimum of it's capabilities, so no stability problems. But we have talked to various other people who said that when they deploy more components in SOA Suite, they run into more performance issues and the like. We're afraid to do that, so we're staying with the minimal.

It is very scalable.

We have been happy with the response we get. We have a huge license that we own, so Oracle does try to keep us happy.

We used to use SMT, which then became obsolete, so we changed to SOA Suite.

We had high hopes of deploying SOA architecture, which didn't go anywhere because it's a lot of money and effort, so things are on hold. It is too big of solution for us at this point. 

We bought what we bought because of what we thought we were going to use it for. Hindsight, we would have never purchased it. So I would say be very clear and have a good understanding of your roadmap and your business strategy. See where you're going because you could be spending a lot of money for something you don't even utilize.

• OSB Administration Console
• Error/Exception Management Framework

SOA Suite greatly improved application to application integration when it was implemented.

New tools like Managed File Transfer (MFT) and Enterprise Scheduler Service released with the latest version made things easier.

4 years

8

SOA Suite setup and deployment is very user friendly and easy to implement.

I have always worked with Oracle partners and we usually implement for clients. Implementation is relatively easy.

SOA Suite initial cost (acquisition and implementation) is relatively expensive but I believe it's worth its price and the long-term benefits are enormous.

I'll advise potential customers, especially large enterprises, to go for this product.

• 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.