Oracle Integration Cloud Service Reviews

There are three major scenarios where we use the product. One is Oracle has applications integrated with other applications internal to the customers' organization. 

The second use case is having Oracle SaaS applications integrated with third-party suppliers or third-party integrator applications. For example, for a payment gateway of a bank. 

The third one is this OIC integration. Cloud services are used as a standardized integration platform, where they'll be used even for non-Oracle SaaS application purposes. In a hybrid model, they can use it for various applications. This becomes an integration platform to bring any other applications, whether upstream or downstream, connected to the product for services offering as well as consumption of the services.

The OIC is very good. It comes with a lot of pre-built integration APIs. It's already there, so it's very helpful for integrations and they can serve very specific purposes also. The actual good old days of programming or coding to make the integration work at a precise level of expertise or work is not needed. That's the advantage here. It's user-friendly.

The job of Oracle is to offer us a total service, including licenses, support fees, postings, visas, et cetera. Everything is bundled. That makes everything easier.

From a security perspective, a connectivity perspective, and the ability to set it up as a hybrid, the solution is very good.

It is easy to set up the product.

The solution is stable. 

We can scale the solution. 

We would love to have more and more ready-to-use interfaces from Oracle. We'd like to download the marketplace right away. We'd like it, so we don't have to put in so much effort with integration. Therefore, I'm still keen to see a continuation in the addition of ready-to-use interfaces. 

This solution is recent, however, we have been partners with Oracle for the last about 20 or 25 years. This solution is more recent. We've only used it for about four or five years if you include the previous version of the cloud product.

The solution is very stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good. 

It can scale. You can just keep provisioning it. Of course, you need additional computing power, however, you can always add it. It comes with a certain cost, which needs to be considered. That said, the scalability is there; you can increase, optimize, or decrease it also.

Technical support is really good, actually. There are no issues as such in terms of product support or anything like that. Everything is done from the Oracle side itself.

The solution is very straightforward and simple to set up. 

It is relatively easy and not that difficult. At the moment, you just provision and subscribe to it, you just need to provision it. We can do it on our own; it's not a big task.

Just to set it up, you don't need too many people. One person is enough to do the deployment. However, if you want to deploy various integrations, then it depends on the number of applications, and the number of integrations you need to deploy and set it up. If there are maybe ten to 15 integrations, you can do it in less than six weeks or so.

Still, if there are a lot of complexities and too many products are there, and you want to do it very quickly, then you need to add manpower to load it. Otherwise, it is relatively straightforward. Typically, you will need engineers to handle the deployment. 

We were able to handle the deployment ourselves. 

The return on investment is there, especially in terms of operations part. From a licensing perspective or management perspective, the patching, and all these other things are taken care of straight away by Oracle. We don't have to allocate time.

Therefore, maintenance administration or around 40% of the activities or efforts now happens automatically. Since it is ready to use and the majority of the services are available, there is a significant amount of time and labor savings in terms of effort reduction.

I'm an Oracle partner. 

We deal with the most up-to-date version of the product.

One has to understand their requirements before deploying the solution. You need to analyze it and see whether it is available for them to leverage its capabilities. Most of the interfaces are already in place. You just need to provision it and configure it. That's it.

This is a relatively new product. It may still need maturing, however, it is already quite good.

I'd rate it eight out of ten.

Whatever data is going in and out of Oracle, we are using Oracle Integration Cloud Service for any inbound or outbound integrations.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service can improve file handling. Currently, our real-time file polling limitation is 10 MB, if that size can be increased it would be helpful. For example, increasing the size from 10 MB to 1 GB.

I have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service for approximately 

We have been satisfied with the performance of Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service is scalable.

We have approximately 30 IT experts in my small organization. We have plans to increase the usage of the solution in the future.

Oracle has a support portal where we can raise a service request and we can have our issues addressed. They provide an average level of support.

I have not used another similar solution prior to Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

The initial setup of Oracle Integration Cloud Service was easy.

The deployment is very easy to export from one and import from another, it only requires a simple one-button click. For 100 integrations it can take 30 minutes. We usually use microservice for very small integrations and then connect them together.

The deployment of Oracle Integration Cloud Service was done in-house.

We have one person who does the deployment and maintenance of Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

My advice to others is if you are looking for integrations with other Oracle solutions, then this is a great choice. Otherwise, you can explore other middleware platforms.

I rate Oracle Integration Cloud Service an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for inbound and outbound integrations.

Integration Cloud and Visual Builder Cloud Service (VBCS) are the solution's most valuable features.

We encounter challenges with the solution's REST service while exporting demographic data from Oracle Time and Labor to a third-party application. It is challenging to produce reports for larger data sets.

We have been using the solution for five years.

It is a highly stable solution. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. We have more than 100 solution users in our organization.

We encounter issues while raising the change request. It is complicated to follow multiple steps to identify the correct incident category. This area needs improvement. Also, it would be helpful if the same representative addresses multiple service requests of the same issue for better coordination.

Positive

We have used Azure Logic Apps before. It provides advanced customization and integration with multiple third-party systems. In comparison, Oracle is easy to use and understand.

The solution's initial setup process is straightforward. It provides easy-to-understand documents to refer to for implementation. Depending on the business requirements, it takes around five minutes to one or two days to complete.

I rate the process a nine out of ten.

The solution's pricing is relatively lower than other vendors.

If you already use the Oracle ERP system, you should opt for OIC. It is a stable and low-cost solution. It has user-friendly features and impressive integration capabilities. Also, it provides regular updates.

I rate it a ten out of ten.

We are vendors and implement this solution for our clients. I'm a senior Oracle SOA lead. 

We implemented this solution in an organization that was able to use OIC without having to procure any hardware. They bought the subscription and implemented quickly. It's the main advantage of the product. 

The solution has many valuable features including a large list of supported adapters and security. It provides various ways to secure services as well as providing extensive support.

I think this product is evolving and there are certain areas where there are still some limitations. The solution has a payload size limit and there are some legacy applications we'd like to integrate but can't. We can get what we need using our on-premise product, but not OIC. Our clients generally have on-premise servers and they have processes they'd like to convert to OIC but they're not supported and so our clients look for other solutions. I would like to see more flexibility regarding accessibility to files. 

I've been using this solution for a couple of years. 

The solution is generally stable. Sometimes changes come through that are not supported by OIC and we have to find a workaround and modify them manually. 

The solution is scalable but we haven't tested that yet. We tried to download a large file from a CM cloud but services were getting timed out because it took longer than five minutes.

Technical support is generally okay but some of the staff are not sufficiently experienced. 

For basic requirements, the initial setup is easy but when you start integrating more complex applications, it can become more complicated. We carried out a deployment that included the build, design, and development to production and it took about six months for around 10 processes. We have three developers who work on OIC and we maintain, develop and enhance the product. 

I'm unaware of licensing costs but I know that Oracle requires the purchase of two separate products, with separate billing. If I want one integration with API CS, I have to pay twice for the one call. It's one of the major factors for clients not choosing this product and it should be included in the API CS part of OIP.

We're always evaluating other tools like Microsoft Azure which might be more useful for some of our clients. 

It's worth evaluating all options including on-prem ones as well as other products in the market, like MuleSoft and Microsoft Azure, comparing features and cost. You might choose a product based on cost and then find there will be limitations in terms of the features it provides.

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

Our typical use case is getting data, either real-time or bulk data. So, in the case of bulk data, we use Oracle Integration Cloud Service to get to an FTP location and read the file from the FTP location and do the necessary transforms in the solution and send it to the Oracle Cloud.

For real-time, we use Oracle Integration Cloud Service to expose the guest services to the consumers. We send data to the Oracle Integration Cloud Service from on-premise applications. After that, we send it to Oracle Cloud and other third-party application file sorts. For example, we integrated with a bank in the past. We sent data to HSBC bank and City Bank using the Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

The features I find the most valuable are the schedule and app-driven integrations. Some 90% of our use cases are covered by these two components. Sometimes we have to create a PaaS component. For that, we have to go for the DVCS screen in case the customer wants to have a screen where they can visualize their data. 

There is room for improvement with the Process Cloud Service (PCS) component. I would like to be able to implement a workflow in the PCS component because it is not as straightforward to use, even with help from the documentation. We are always having to take training if we want to implement a PCS component. The PCS component is the most complicated aspect of Oracle Integration Cloud Service. The PCS component should either be improved or Oracle should create some training documentation for this component specifically. I have not been able to find any training documentation for the PCS component. 

Oracle has parent and child integrations and once the parent submits a job to the child, it doesn't wait for a response. Some of our use cases are more complicated and there may be one parent integration and two child integrations. In this scenario, if one child finishes first, the parent may remove the second child's integration. This sort of scenario is difficult to resolve because the parent calls the child one integration and does not wait for the response.

In most of the scenarios we have, the child one integration should be completed before the child two integration is called, but the solution doesn't behave in that way. It parallel calls both child one integration and child two integration. What we often do is avoid the parent and child relationship and go for one big complex integration where you do everything for the parent. 

I have been working with Oracle Integration Cloud Service for three to four years, typically integrating on-premises applications with the cloud.

I find Oracle Integration Cloud Service pretty simple and stable. 

Oracle Integration Cloud Service is scalable. We have not had any performance issues with it. It behaves well. 

Sometimes, the tech support is slow to get back to us. We have had to wait up to two weeks for a response. However, if we follow up on a ticket, they do respond fast. 

Neutral

The Oracle Integration Cloud Service initial setup is easy. It is simple to understand and learn. However, we have run into a few problems on the Oracle SaaS cloud side. We have had to create a tech support ticket with Oracle to get our issue resolved.

We do deployments in-house. We usually have a small deployment team, in addition to an on-premises team, which takes care of the on-premise applications. We also have an Oracle ERP Cloud team, which takes care of the functional aspects of Oracle in Oracle ERP Cloud. 

Our deployment team usually consists of two to three people. How big the deployment team is depends on the number of integrations, but it is fairly simple in the OIC. 

The development team will usually include 10 people, however, we ramp it down to six people for maintenance. 

Oracle Integration Cloud Service is a really good product and the ROI is very good with it. It lowers development time. A development cycle that may have taken a year without Oracle Integration Cloud Service can drop down to three or four months with it. 

I do not deal with the licensing costs directly but I have seen the numbers. Whenever we have to get a license for the OIC, we have to get at least three environments: production, development, and UI test instance. The cost for these three instances is about $100,000 per year. 

I find the licensing a little expensive. If customers are already using Oracle products, they can often get deals and bring down their costs.

We do have trouble with a lack of knowledge about Oracle Integration Cloud Service. Sometimes, customers want us to achieve certain things with integrations that are not so simple. Those use cases are tricky and OIC is not the right solution for all use cases. 

My advice to those looking to implement Oracle Integration Cloud Service is this: you have to have experience with hand-on integration and developing integrations before you can work in a live scenario. 

On a scale of one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best, I would rate Oracle Integration Cloud Service with an eight for overall performance. 

The most valuable features of Oracle Integration Cloud Service are the seeded integrations with many communication platforms, such as Slack and emails. It works best for the historical communication methods. Those are still prevalent with all the other clients. When we are doing the integrations, it makes it a little bit easier for us to communicate the same output over Slack, rather than sending out an email and downloading the report. The number of seeded functionalities within the Oracle Integration Cloud Service platform is better. 

Oracle Integration Cloud Service can improve the downloading and uploading of files. I've submitted this issue to the Oracle Idea Labs. The issue is from the front end of Oracle Integration Cloud, we cannot download or upload a file directly or drag and drop it.

I have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service for approximately three years.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service is highly stable.

The stability of Oracle Integration Cloud Service is great.

We have approximately 100 people using this solution in my company. In my client's company, there are approximately 50 users using it with plans to increase usage.

I have not used the technical support from Oracle. However, I did have contact with the support regarding the package cost of the solution and the response I received was good.

I have not used another solution in the same category as Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

The initial setup of Oracle Integration Cloud Service is very simple and easy to navigate around. For a user to be created and set up, takes approximately five minutes.

We have a technical team of 10. Five of them deal with the implementation, and the other five are handling other aspects, such as maintaining the schedule and any kind of changes requested on an ad-hoc basis

We have seen a return on investment, our client always renews their license.

The price of Oracle Integration Cloud Service is good. It is reasonable and is priced well for the market segment. The model they use is on a per-package unit and we have a two-year subscription.

Others looking into implementing Oracle Integration Cloud Service should explore more as and when new updates and patches are coming out and if their business would fit well with Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

I rate Oracle Integration Cloud Service an eight out of ten.

Oracle ERP Fusion Cloud is used for enterprise resource planning. We have different ERP modules at HCM, such as human capital management, supply chain management, and asset work management. 

We use Oracle Integration Cloud to automate a large number of integrations. For example, if you want to load the employee file from, say, a boundary system or Workday, you are providing me with a file containing the employees' salaries, and designations. I need to import it into the Oracle ERP Fusion Cloud or the ERP cloud's human capital management module, but there is no simple or direct way to import that file into the ERP cloud or that CM.

In Oracle Integration Cloud, we take the file, read it, and transform it to meet the MAT requirements of the ERP cloud or SIM cloud. For example, we create the HDL for a MAT file that contains HCM data, we also automate it. Basically, you provide the file, and we transform it. We will submit the job to ERP, where we will be able to encrypt, decrypt, and increase security. The Boundary system only needs to provide the file, and we will convert it to the required format and load it into the ERP cloud, sending notifications, logging, and monitoring.

There was initially we had two products on-premises, with were BPEL and Oracle Service Bus. When stateless integrations were required, we used Oracle Service Bus, and when a large flow was required, as well as a long-running process, we used BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). Oracle has removed these two distinctions and has merged them into one. Oracle Integration Cloud Service can create two services: one that is simple request and response, and one that can run for an extended period of time which is a good thing. That is extremely valuable. As an organization, you do not have to buy a separate product or two separate products for it.

Furthermore, everything is now under Oracle's control, from an infrastructure standpoint. Initially, when we had an on-premise structure or the on-premise SOA Suite, we had to maintain the logs and server as an organization.

It was entirely the organization's fault if the server crashed. They needed to hire web logic administrators. There was another layer. There was an administrative layer and a development layer. There were a lot of node managers and admin managers. We no longer have to be concerned about infrastructure at all. If the server fails, Oracle will take care of it. We do not need to engage in web logic administration consultations to investigate this. The Oracle is in charge of everything. And if there is any maintenance, Oracle will take care of it as well.

They will provide you with a timeline stating that on this day, we will be performing upgrades or releasing some manuals or updates. Oracle has completely automated this process. You no longer need to be concerned about it. There is no web logic, nothing.

The dashboard provided by Oracle Integration Cloud for monitoring and error handling is very intuitive. For example, if I trigger the integration and can also schedule it within OIC, there is no need for a third-party scheduler to schedule the integration in the OIC integration cloud. 

We do have a good scheduler in place. We also have encryption and decryption systems in place. Which is good. 

With the dashboard for monitoring, you do not need a third-party dashboard or logging framework when you initiate the integration.

We can certainly create some logging framework, but for some of the lightweight integrations or logging where we do not want to retain the data for an extended period of time, the logging framework within the OIC is sufficient. The dashboard is excellent. You get a clear picture of how it works, where the flow is, logs, log management, and everything.

It is simple to incorporate into some of the best products. I can, for example, directly integrate with Workday and Oracle. There are many adapters directly available, as well as numerous inbuilt integrations shared by Oracle. We can use it as is with a little tweaking. 

There are a lot of adapters, which is what I like the most. This greatly simplifies the integration. There is no web service. You should not be concerned about it. You simply configure that after, and there will be direct connectivity, which you can use as it is. There are many options.

This is entirely web-based development. We lack an IDE for developing integrations. Back in the days of OSB and BEPL, we had to go into the code and not just drag and drop. We used to go into XML and modify it. We could, for example, edit some XSLT or XQuery documentation, but this is mostly a drag-and-drop. A person cannot directly enter the code or examine and modify so many variables. As a result, one had to rely solely on the drag and drop feature.

Oracle has implemented a few modifications. For example, you can now manually edit the XSLT by going into the code, but there are many things you cannot change. You cannot move from one location to another. UI-based controls still have room to improve, but migration can be made simple. If we are migrating integrations from one environment to another, such as development to testing, if it is a one-click migration, which is possible in some cases, that would have been good.

As of now, we simply export the IIR and import it into the new environment. Migration and the User Interface could be improved.

Make it more similar to the on-premises features. For example, if you can edit the code directly rather than just dragging and dropping, or if you can edit the examples by going into the background, and one-click migration, I'd like to see included in the next release.

I have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service since 2016, nearly five or six years.

I am working with the most recent version, which is deployed on the Oracle infrastructure.

I find the performance to be really good, mostly, but it depends on the implementation, how the developer implements it, or what the design and patterns are, but I find the performance to be really, really good. Furthermore, Oracle is constantly improving the OCI infrastructure. 

We now have many features and options, such as buckets for Object Cloud Storage. You don't have to rely on the FTP server as much; if it's a file-based integration, you can use file buckets directly to access the files. 

In terms of performance, I think it's good. And the stability, it is stable. I haven't faced many issues. We do encounter slowness on occasion. For example, if there are other integrations, sometimes there is slowness, and we immediately raise an SR with Oracle, and they work on it.

It is easily scalable. For example, if you want to add servers to an existing set of servers to increase elasticity, it is easy. As demand changes, the elasticity can be reduced or increased.

It is also dynamic. It is dynamic in some of its features. It automatically enhances the server if it is needed more and reduces the servers if they are idle for an extended period of time.

We work for a variety of clients. I am sure there are a lot of clients who are currently using this Oracle Integration Cloud solution.

We do have an Oracle practice we call Oracle COE which stands for Center Of Excellence. For just OIC, I would estimate that we have a global team of over 500 developers.

Just for OIC, we have Fusion products separately, Oracle integration, ERP Cloud, and SIM cloud, that is the SaaS layer, but they can be more than 500 developers for the PaaS layer.

This solution is extensively being used by our organization.

I believe it will be used even more or remain stable, but I do not believe its demand will decrease. But, the usage will be more.

I would rate the technical support a four out of five. There is always room to improve.

Positive

I was previously working on the on-premise middleware solution, the Oracle SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Suite, which included BPEL and Oracle Service Bus, but everything was later moved to the cloud.

Oracle Integration Cloud is now available. It was first introduced around 2014 or 2015.

I began working with the on-premises solution. Then there's the cloud. There was an Oracle server switch stack on-premise. I've been using the Oracle suite since the beginning of my career. Initially on-premise, but now in the cloud.

I started out working with Informatica as well. That was a batch integration, such as for heavy-duty integrations or large files containing GBs of data. So I started with Informatica as well, but after that, I've only used Oracle products for online integrations and other integrations.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is not complex.

I would rate the implementation process a three and a half out of five because it is easy.

We are using Jenkins, and we have written some scripts to take integrations from one environment to another. We are logging everything, checking it into git, and then automating the processes in Jenkins. It starts with the IIR and then moves on to another environment. That doesn't take long. For example, if there are hundreds of integrations, Jenkins can deploy them in one or two hours. But, if you don't have Jenkins and you don't have automated scripts, it will be a lot of manual work. 

There are currently no one-click solutions. If we had a one-click migration feature, it would have been good. We're still using Jenkins script, it's not too difficult. It takes about one or two hours to deploy hundreds of integrations.

The deployment was done in-house. We are consultants and I am one of the consultants on my team.

We develop on our own. We raise an SR if there is a requirement. And if we have any questions about the product or suggestions for improvements, we do so as an Oracle SR.

I am not aware of the pricing.

Even if you have no prior experience with Oracle product integrations, it is easy to learn and use because it is mostly, drag and drop. If you are not familiar with coding or development or Java or JavaScript, you can easily learn Oracle Integration Cloud. This is mostly a configuration-based development, and you only need to use your mind and logic to implement it better in a performance-tuned way, but it's very simple. I would recommend that you use it. 

It makes integration so quick and simple.

I would rate Oracle Integration Cloud Service an eight out of ten. There is always room for improvement, but eight is definitely a good rating.

We are partners with Oracle.

This can be an Oracle-agnostic tool; it does not have to be Oracle-specific; it can integrate any other tools as well. However, it is very useful for integrating other Oracle applications. 

It can easily integrate Oracle Financial Suite, Oracle CPQ, and any other Oracle products, for example. When working with Oracle, this is the unmistakable integration tool we recommend. 

This is also an autonomous one, self-service, which is fantastic. If you need more messaging capacity, you can add it on a self-service page in the public cloud. It does a variety of market standard adapters, such as SAP, Google, and Facebook, as well as DocuSign.

Coupa is a purchasing system that connects purchase invoices to our Oracle payables module. You may not know anything about Coupa, but if you have a Coupa adapter connection, you can drag and drop, and then you can simply get the Coupa connection. It will automatically connect to Coupa and pull data from it. 

Because it can easily connect to Oracle natively, it connects to Oracle and pushes data into Oracle. This is one of your use cases. You can also use Concur, which is an expensive product.

Another option is to transfer expense invoices from the Concur system to the Oracle payables model. It's the same thing back and forth; you can even push data from Oracle to Coupa if you need to send an acknowledgment.

The most valuable features of this solution are the SFTP adapters, file adapters, and risk adapters, that we use in everyday projects.

In terms of improvement, debugging and error handling, Oracle can be much more user-friendly on this, because clients must provide a much more error handling framework, which is a monitoring framework, that is much better. 

The current one has some level of monitoring, but then there are retrying mechanisms, automatically retrying mechanisms and error recovery mechanisms. Those things need to be greatly improved; they have something, but it is very basic.

The error retrying mechanism could be improved. If an error occurs, it can be retried automatically, it would be helpful.

Resilience can be enhanced.

The migration flow has to improve.

They have some kind of agent connecting with the on-premise systems. We need to simplify the process of connecting with non-cloud applications.

If you have to connect to some servers from this cloud to non-cloud, that is a bit of a hassle.

They now have something called an agent for those, but they can simplify it, and the error frameworks can be implemented much more effectively.

ICS is the correct solution but it is a bit old. The advanced version of ICS is called OIC Gen 2 (Oracle Integration Cloud Generation 2).

We probably used ICS a few years ago. Those are now out of date, and Oracle will not be releasing that product. It is probably supported, but Oracle has migrated away from that product at least two years ago. With ICS, you can't just publish that because it's out of date. You may be able to correct it if Oracle upgraded it to OIC.

I have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service for two or three years. Not recently, but sometime in 2017 or 2018.

In the last 12 months we used it, but not the ICS version; instead, the most recent version was used.

OIC Gen 2 is the latest version.

Stability is, I believe, 90%. 10% is because the runtime system, at times, becomes unstable due to data center issues, or things that have gone wrong in productions. But that is probably only 2% of the problem; the remaining 8% will have intermittent problems.

There are some restrictions. That is something that bothers us because there are some service limitations. For example, the file size is limited to this amount; there are some restrictions. Oracle claims that it is being restricted internally due to performance issues. 

If you use a file larger than a GB or something, they offer very different adapters with different restrictions, that is all. 

According to the current situation, we will either split the file and then manage it internally. But it adds a lot of, sometimes unnecessary, overhead for us because the team implements; we need to improve that. There are some things they can work on to improve.

The solution is only used by the core IT team; no one else uses it.  It will be a five-person team from the client's side.

Not more than five, because the client's IT teams are limited to five people, and they only manage it. There are a maximum of five people.

We use it every day.

On a scale of one to five, I would rate technical support as four. 1 percent of the time, Oracle responses, support status, depending on the engineer, I believe 1 percent will be a good or bad experience.

Positive

On the technology side, we have something called Oracle Autonomous Database or Oracle Integration Cloud on the platform.

Google Cloud Platform I worked with a few years ago, but not recently. However, I am currently involved with Oracle Cloud.

We were using it for one of our Mexican clients. We probably used it for a year and a half. They are still using it, but I am not in contact with that client, but everything is going well for them.

I understand the fundamentals of Google Cloud SQL as well as other frameworks they provide, such as Spark. We also used their database.

Spark by Apache. That is something; that was used to handle all of the panel processing tasks and was something we didn't have in Oracle. We won't have as much leverage in Oracle, but we'll have many tools.

We use them primarily for performance handling. Heavy data can be easily processed in a memory partition, which they do in the memory, and then process in different pipelines concurrently, which is made efficient. That was really good, and they had a lot of leverage in terms of monitoring those files that were being loaded into the system. They had detailed logging and could monitor everything from their consoles. Which is good.

I am familiar with the Java Cloud and the Developer Cloud, but neither was used by us. Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, also known as ATP, is what we used. Not mobile Autonomous Transaction Processing Database It has nothing to do with mobile; it is simply Oracle or ATP.

The beauty of this Autonomous Transaction Processing is that it is nothing more than a database, but it is not the database cluster that Oracle provides. The main advantage of this is that, as you can see, everything is managed internally by artificial intelligence. You want to scale the processor's memory, but everything is already scaled.

There is no DVA to maintain that; it all happens automatically. When you submit a request, it is automatically adjusted and scalable.

Not Oracle Data Integration Cloud Service, which is designed specifically for data conversion, but rather a middleware, solution from Oracle, that is known as SOA Suite. Oracle has an SOA suite, but the thinner version of it is, and this is one Oracle is promoting, it is Oracle Integration Cloud.

Google is in Oracle because we are mostly all Oracle. Oracle, because we only tried the Google platform once because the client specifically requested it.

We normally recommend it because this Oracle product integrates with all Oracle products and we only implement Oracle products. This easily connects with all Oracle products in the ecosystem, the time you save is actually beneficial. 

Then this product is very specific to Oracle, it can be general, but it has very good features when trying to integrate with Oracle products.

The initial setup is easy.

I would rate the initial setup a four out of five.

This is where the deployment side comes into play. Oracle does not provide an out-of-the-box way to migrate or deploy from one environment to another. This needs to be improved. We can do it in a custom way, but Oracle should have some sort of migration flow.

This solution requires a developer, an administrator, and multiple developers to maintain it. I mean, depending on the size of your project, you can have a minimum of 2, 3 up to 10, depending on the complexity of your system.

As this is a cloud, I have seen a return on investment. It has reduced the number of administrators required to maintain the servers, but this is due to the fact that they are autonomous self-services.

I would rate it a five out of five.

Licensing costs vary from client to client, depending on the client's other products purchased. 

They look at discounts, and these are all based on a contract, not a flat rate. It specifies how much data you use and how much storage you require, among other things. 

Depending on the requirements. For example, it depends on the message, and how much data throughput will go through.

I would rate the price a three out of five. 

I know there are many other competing products, but Oracle can probably be a little bit cheaper than this.

There are no additional fees to the standard licensing fee.

We explored Google, as well as MuleSoft, and Dell has an integration solution.

In general, there are multiple platforms with the Oracle platform. For example, in Google Cloud, one of the services is a database. Oracle can also have multiple services, corresponding database service, that is an Oracle database service. But, to the best of my knowledge, that framework is not available in Oracle. Google is more Java-based, so they have a lot of Java frameworks that can be used.

We will recommend this to all of our clients because it is a feature that Oracle is promoting, and it is working well for us. 

We recommend that you use this product.

I strongly advise them to use this if they are using Oracle-related solutions, and they can definitely try it because, in addition to Oracle, it has other connectivities, such as I mentioned Concur, Coupa, and SAP. They have connectors for that as well, they should try it out.

I would rate Oracle Integration Cloud Service an eight out of ten.

The remaining two are due to pending items. It's a bit lightweight. When it comes to heavy volume data handling, they should improve something, but the rest is fine.

We are Oracle's golden partners. We implement Oracle products.

The main use case is "systems integration" for my company's enterprise customers across many different industry sectors.

Many of our customer projects use Oracle Integration Cloud or OIC iPaaS for integrations between disparate systems like ERP, e-commerce, and warehouse systems, from both Oracle and other vendors and technologies. Integration flows were developed for keeping product inventory, prices, addresses in sync between various end-systems and to support key business processes spanning many systems, departments, and organisations. 

Additional non-functional goals were maintainability, stability, scalability, graceful error-handling, decoupling for loose-coupling of distinct core systems, and "predictable performance". The predictability has been verified via repeatable testing and seamless operation in production. 

Additionally, we have implemented other use-cases like shipping integration (such as DHL, FedEx), order flows from e-commerce to ERP, & many more granular and custom use cases specific to customer needs (e.g. implementing internal APIs to support larger enterprise business processes or application user interfaces, bulk data reconciliation and many more).

In general, a cloud-based product helps avoid the high lead-up times and maintenance overheads involved in setting up in-house infrastructure, and this is adequately achieved by OIC iPaaS. 

OIC, in particular, is also well integrated with Oracle SaaS ERP via "business events" and easy to integrate via Rest APIs (though other integration platforms also offer API-based integration, it makes a lot of sense to use OIC if a customer already uses Oracle SaaS). The recent addition of the Kafka-compatible OCI Streaming has since early 2023 allowed us to support a loosely-coupled event-driven integration between different products from different vendors, built on different technologies, and supporting different throughputs.

OIC offers a number of pre-built technology and SaaS adapters for high productivity for a wide range of target systems, both in-house via agents and cloud/SaaS, via a very flexible range of interfaces. These include APIs by way of Rest/SOAP over http/s, files like ZIP and CSV over filesystem or S/FTP, databases,  and more. All of these interface types were utilized in our customer solutions to deliver a range of functionality in the form of "integration flows".

To summarise: OIC helped us to deliver high quality software engineering to our customers, with our solutions being comparably high in supportability, maintainability, loose coupling between disparate core systems, high cohesion in deployable units, clean interfaces, predictable runtime performance and other important properties for supporting any major enterprise

It offered a natural transition from, and in some cases, it complements Oracle's existing middleware like SOA Suite (now SOACS), Oracle Service Bus, etc, for many but not all use cases.

Furthermore, it offers a compelling solution within the Oracle environment that makes it easier to integrate Oracle SaaS ERP (via business events, APIs) with any other cloud or in-house product that might support many different interface types. 

Our organization, as a neutral systems integrator with a "client advocacy" approach, also offers solutions built on open-source platforms like Apache Camel. However, the choice of platform depends on customer preferences, suitability, and fit with the rest of their IT environment. Singhpora Consulting aims to deliver good "Software Engineering", i.e. an optimal balance between upfront costs, quality, supportability, maintainability, and runtime performance to customers on tools and platforms best suited to them, rather than promote any one particular product. 

To have a realistic picture of Customers must however keep in mind that the mere fact that it is "cloud" and "iPaaS" does not mean a zero-effort pay-as-you-go solution. There is still quality technical design and skill required in actually producing a good solution to be deployed on it.

Moreover, there is still ongoing effort involved in "Systems Administration". This includes functions like physical or virtual network setup and administration, information security, DB administration, patching, updates, etc. These are not directly "iPaaS" functions but important supporting functions, and the quality of these functions can be critical in every project. Some of these functions are also shared between the cloud provider like Oracle, other vendors, or the customer. 

This is over and above quality and effort involved in the "Application Development" practice, which is what developers and applications architects do. We develop and deploy integration flows that run on the iPaaS platform.

Finally, the most important lesson from decades of Software Engineering should be that every IT system must be independently verifiable by professionals in a given area, such as accounting, supply chain management, or logistics. Automation (and increasingly AI) is valuable as a tool to scale up human effort, verifiability, accountability and explanability are very important properties of good solutions - OIC supports these via a visual flow designer, audit trails/OCI logging, transparency in business rules via the Decision Support System (DSS) component and many more inbuilt features, with adequate features to support more. 

Once customers to keep these expectations clear when making a realistic assessment on skills, budgets, intended outcomes, etc., solutions delivered on OIC can vastly improve efficiency and deliver great value to many enterprises. 

The most valuable features are (Reviewed and updated February 2024):

• Update Mar 2023-Feb 2024: OIC's native integration via the OCI Streaming Adapter with the Kafka compatible OCI Streaming service allowed us to develop a powerful and scalable integration with a third-party application chosen by the customer. This kept multiple core systems (built on different technologies, with different throughputs) completely decoupled. The setup of OCI Stream was much easier than a comparable messaging technology, as the setup was serverless. Scaling the message throughput was relatively easy via partitions, and third-party applications could use standard Kafka-compatible interfaces to produce and consume from the OCI Stream. 
• Update Aug 2022: The Decision Support System component or DSS(decision table and rules engine) in general is a valuable feature that is closley integrated with the OIC platform's enterprise edition. It can be used to externalise logic from deployable code (hence simplifying releases whilst making key business logic more configurable and transparent)
• Process Cloud Service (PCS) supports the industry standard Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) for business analysis. Being part of the OIC platform, this facilitates closer collaboration between various stakeholders from multiple departments and even multiple organisations participating in a business process 
• Easy to provision OIC environments (subject to security assessments and ensuring adequate security controls on endpoints)
• Predictable costs and pay for use billing
• It is easy to scale instances, though scalability also depends on how well designed the actual solution is that is being deployed on Oracle Integration Cloud.
• Decent designer interface for flow design and manipulation.
  
• Easy to promote across environments as environment-specific "Connections" are decoupled from the actual "deployable unit" (the *.iar archive). This is a big plus, as it is better for security (credentials don't leave the environment) and also maintainability (less chance of deployment errors, less chance of promoting a deployable unit meant for TEST into PRODUCTION). Some of the other technologies do not offer this decoupling and I have seen first hand some of the undesirable situations this can lead to in some badly implemented legacy environments.
• A range of connectors for different interfaces like files, sftp, http/s Rest/SOAP, databases, and more. With OIC, things "just work", with the right skills, experience, and attitude of course.
• Update Aug 2022/reviewed in gen2 Jan2023: For quite some time now, XSL editing has possible in both Designer and Code modes (as of this writing, some important XSL constructs such as variables are not usable in the browser based designer view, even though they have always been editable via an external IDE like JDeveloper)

Improvements can be made in several areas, as follows:

• Configurable timeouts on each connection would be better than a single global timeout that applies to all. The rationale for why timeouts are necessary is described here: https://weblog.singhpora.com/2019/07/fault-tolerance-in-integration-flows.html  In my opinion, this feature can actually save resources (CPU, memory) for Oracle and also deliver better runtime functionality to customers. 
• Retryable scopes and activities could be useful. 
• Easier ability to edit a DB operation via DBAdapter when a schema changes, such as a column added or removed from a table (Update Aug 2022: it's possible via the wizard but needs a slightly non-intuitive series of steps) 
• Ability to add Java libraries for very corner situations like file/ftp adapter valves, which is a feature that exists in Oracle Service Bus and can be very useful in some rare situations.
• OIC arteracts should support standard source control formatting for easier comparison across versions

We have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service since Q3 of 2018.

Stability-wise, it is excellent. See the note on scalability. A scalable solution is also stable and predictable in the event of "infinite load".

Scalability is an important non-functional requirement in any software engineering project. Scalability supports two other non-functional requirements: performance (e.g. throughput or data processed per unit time OR response time in a synchronous request-response scenario), and availability (for high availability, the environment needs more instances in a cluster so if one goes down, others can serve requests without causing downtime to consumers)

Scalability depends on two (occasionally competing) aspects:

1. Platform-level scalability; this is the ease of provisioning hardware, VMs, application server instances in a cluster, etc. In the case of Oracle Integration Cloud, this aspect is well abstracted away from application developers and fairly easy to manage. It can easily scale up or down.
   
   
2. The second important aspect of scalability is the actual technical design of the application. In OIC's case, "integration flow", that is deployed on the platform.

A well-designed solution can achieve the same performance on a fewer number of instances, less memory, and less CPU. A well-designed solution that is "scalability-friendly" would easily spread its load across multiple instances that might be available to it and its performance (throughput) would ideally improve linearly with an increase in the number of instances. An important quality of a scalable solution is also that in the event of "infinite load", it would only accept as much as it can easily process at a predictable rate given the resources available to it, and would then start accepting more as more resources are made available (a non-scalable solution would simply fail under such an 'overload' situation). 

It often happens that some of these application design level aspects of scalability get neglected, therefore, customers often end up incurring unnecessary costs in merely "platform-level" scalability with the expectation that "performance issues" would go away by throwing more OIC instances at an application. 

To deliver the best outcome to customers, both of the above perspectives on scalability need to be addressed. 

For our customer's use cases, we achieved this with our application design and repeated testing with large data volumes. We did not over-engineer or over-optimize, even when we felt the solution could be enhanced to perform with higher throughput, we took customer's feedback on when the throughput was acceptable for their immediate business objectives, to avoid diminishing returns

Technical support is excellent by and large, but could be better and more consistent.

Positive

The choice of technology depends on the customer's environment, suitability for their use case, preferences, and other needs. We deliver solutions on multiple technologies and each can have pros and cons. 

Oracle Integration Cloud was the best suited for some major enterprise customers. 

On other customer projects, we have delivered solutions on Mulesoft, Apache Camel, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Service Bus, and more.

There are many "conceptual" similarities that I can see as a Software Engineer, but there are very many implementation level differences not just limited to technology but also in vendor support, community eco-system, and quality of professionals. 

The initial setup was straightforward and it was easy to get productive. Oracle offered initial support and guidance as well, as they were keen for the technology to be adopted. 
However, enterprise customers MUST seek advice from qualified professionals around systems administration and network security, including penetration testing in consultation with Oracle, and must conduct a proper risk assessment as with any other non-trivial enterprise IT system whether or not it is cloud-based.

We developed in-house. Singhpora Consulting was sub-contracted to develop key parts of the solution

Many open-source products can offer a high level of customizability and no upfront licensing cost. However, there can be a high cost involved in provisioning infrastructure, expertise, and other aspects. 

In the case of Oracle Integration Cloud, costs can be "predictable" as far as the platform and infrastructure are concerned. The platform offers a range of pre-built adapters and connectors but it is a closed platform controlled by Oracle. This has pros and cons in terms of flexibility versus productivity.

Yes, identical usecases were implemented on multiple platforms to identify the optimal balance of cost, time, and quality

Self-promotion: Please visit https://weblog.singhpora.com or contact us directly on info@singhpora.com

Customers can contact us for no-obligations brief consultations for their use cases where they might consider our future involvement.

I am not well-versed in Oracle Integration Cloud Service. All I know is that it serves as a path or channel for us to transfer some files, but I am still unclear as to whether it is a cloud-based storage solution or a type of data communication tool. I am still trying to fully grasp the function and purpose of ICS.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Integration Cloud Service is its performance.

It would be helpful if there were more tutorials or documentation to learn about Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

I have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service for approximately three years.

The stability of Oracle Integration Cloud Service has been great.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service is scalable, we have tripped out the size. I am confident that it can continue to scale.

We have previously used an account solution prior to Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

The price of Oracle Integration Cloud Service is reasonable to start with, but when you scale it becomes expensive.

I rate Oracle Integration Cloud Service a six out of ten.