Share your experience using Oracle BPEL

We use the product for business process execution. To integrate two end systems, we use Oracle BPEL for orchestration. We define the logic step by step in BPEL through orchestration. This process uses different adaptors and connectors to connect both endpoints, the source and target systems. The logic is defined in BPEL. We can do data enrichment and data modifications based on some conditions. If any faults or errors happen, the solution will handle them so that the data is in sync in both systems.

BPEL Export tool is valuable to me. The solution provides different features for annotations, calling, and email notifications. The catch and catchAll functions for error handling are very useful. The product has everything we need.

I need user-defined functions in the accessibility files. When we enrich or modify the data received from source systems, we would require user-defined functions. Some user-defined functions for transformation must be added to the next release of the solution.

I have been using the solution for nine years.

I rate the tool’s stability an eight and a half out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability a nine out of ten. Currently, I work with five to six organizations and 90% of them use the solution. It is the most used one, compared to Oracle Service Bus and Oracle Mediator. Our clients are enterprise businesses.

We get very good support from Oracle. I rate the support team a nine and a half out of ten.

Positive

I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten. It is pretty straightforward.

The time taken for deployment depends on the complexity of the solutions. It depends on the orchestration, logic, and other conditions. A couple of integration can be done in one week. This includes designing, development, testing, and migration into production. When we migrate from on-premise to cloud or hybrid integrations, we add Cloud Adapter and connector.

Most of the complexity is part of the transformation. The source system may be in a different format, and the target system may have a different data format. BPEL receives the data and modifies it based on the requirements of the target system. We need to concentrate more on this process.

The product is moderately priced. I rate the price a six out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the tool.

I'm a consultant. I do architecting, designing, and development. I have used two versions, 1.1 and 2.0. I’m unsure about the prices because I oversee the development and implementation. I'll highly recommend the product depending on an organization’s requirements. As someone who has worked with BPEL for 13 years, I highly recommend the product for an on-premise or hybrid integration.

Multiple products or alternate solutions have come into the integration domain. However, the product has been in the industry from SOA 11g to SOA 12c and OIC. Though there are multiple competitors, the product has been here for a long time and has been helping multiple customers improve their business. Overall, I rate the solution a nine or nine and a half out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is an ordering system that captures orders. The orders are made in XML, which keeps track of everything that you did from the ordering to having the information of the order. But not everything is in the ordering because you have to consult, for example, the address system, the availability system, the visibility system, and the facility system. We are a telecommunications company and to provide a service, you need to know which facilities you have for that. For that, you need a BPEL that received XML from the ordering that tried to consult the external internal system to try to retrieve the information needed to put the order and then deliver it to the OSS.

The OSS receives the order through the SOA with BPEL and, for example, after that, the same OSS tries to send it to ADOBE, the workforce management system, to try to deliver it to our technician. 

We have two types of integrations, one that comes from the north and one that comes from the south. Ultimately, we answer the ordering when everything is okay from the west end. Everything is in SOA. Midway, we use SOA and try to interact with many systems that are needed to provide information to the OSS, the workforce management system, and giving answers and responses to the ordering.

What I find the most valuable about Oracle BPEL is that it saves me time. For example, when I use a language like Java, I have to generate clients if I am also using SOA. I lose time doing that because I am interacting with a third party or a third service. The goal is to avoid having to implement from a scratch a logic of integration based on the service. If I want to carry out multiple integrations, I don't have to implement the protocol itself, because BPEL implements it for me. This in effect means that I avoid doing a lot of work and am operating in a more friendly environment. With BPEL, you can track everything: every variable that is filled and every result related to integration with another service. It gives you more facility to try to track the course of your integrations.

Our biggest issue with Oracle BPEL is that it is a monolith. Because it's a monolith, everybody tries to consume its services in a shared infrastructure. Because of this, some companies are trying to migrate to a microservice architecture. We use API gateways to get around these issues. If you want an orchestrator with BPEL and you have an API gateway with a layer of services, you can combine both technologies and try to get the best of both worlds.

In the next release, I would like to see REST improved and new technologies for microservices. I'd like to see more containers for separating containers.

I have been using Oracle BPEL for about 10 years.

I think that this is quite a stable product for the most part. We have been working with it since 2009. Issues come up, in my experience, only when you have many congruences with many clients that don't know how to implement things. However, if you know how to implement things and how to avoid overloading your infrastructure and have a plan for growing your company, you are going to have the stability that you need.

I would rate their technical support a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Positive

My opinion is that it isn't a difficult setup because you have a server on which you install the SOA that is your container in Weblogic. There you have everything that you need. For example, if you need GUIs, data sources, or a database, and you have someone to install everything, I don't think that you will have a hard time. If you need to deploy from scratch, what you need is an application server or database server. From there, you can try to configure an API manager. 

With Weblogic in 12C and 11G, it's way easier to install everything.

The deployment usually takes around a week, depending on if you have everything needed for the setup.

The reason we decided to use Oracle BPEL is that we have a lot of systems. We have 3,300 systems because we are a big company that has telephone services, mobile services, cable services, and many products related to that. That is why we need to have something that has business logic that tries to orchestrate between systems that we need. Ultimately, we have SOA as a service internally that has a purpose and a business logic that interacts with many things.

Currently, we have a team of 10 developers using this solution.

This product can be a good use case depending on what you need. If you have many systems and you want to have the logic of integration, I think that is a good idea because in the end, you are saving time, you are trying to reduce cost in infrastructure to have many layers between your company.