Oracle Integration Cloud Service Reviews

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. 

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.

If I want to integrate with my on-premise application at the financial organization finance, I can do so. I can use the SAT finance and I have Oracle Fusion as my HR solution. I can send information from Oracle Fusion to Oracle SAP. Integration is required and I can use OICS for the dashboard. I can use two types of approaches - one is a real-time approach, and another is the best processing approach. I would always prefer to go with that best processing approach, and if we set a middle layer. It's good, however, to have options.

In the middle layer, I can set up one type of integration - a Journey integration. With the Journey integration, are have personal-related information. It is already, readily, available. 

Overall, it's a very good product.

It offers a lot of stability and flexibility. 

The initial setup is easy.

The solution did use to have stability issues, however, that is now dealt with.

The solution is expensive. 

We would always prefer any solution to be more secure. 

I'd rate the solution for three to four years now. I've used it for a while. 

For the first few years, the solution was not stable. It is much more stable now in this instance. It's been stable for about two years or so now. 

We have seven or eight clients using this solution currently. They use a variety of other Oracle products as well that we have helped arrange. 

Oracle has a great dedicated service team. If you have to make a service request, you will get the solution. A forum is also available as are landing guides, which are quite helpful. Based on my experience, they are readily available to assist in multiple ways.

The initial setup is easy. However, the provisioning is employee-based. The provisioning is based on the message list, that we have purchased. 

It did not take that long especially if you have already worked with or had Oracle. Some pre-setup is required, from an organizational perspective. For us, we took data from our on-premises system and installed the OIC agent. 

Our middle layer isn't accessible from anywhere purposefully. That integration was via the internet only. 

In general, the setup and other requirements surrounding the implementation will take time. We had to arrange policies, et cetera, before even beginning the setup process. 

The price could be better and they need to work on their licensing model to make it easier for users. 

We are an implementor. I'm also an Oracle Prime customer. I'm currently using that Oracle for many years and I have a complete ecosystem in Oracle.

Earlier, due to instability, at that time I would never suggest that anyone go with that OICS, integration cloud service. However, now that Oracle has improved a lot in the OIC part, I would recommend it. However, it depends on that ecosystem. If the surrounding technology is related to Oracle, it's a great integration tool. I would always prefer that OICS. However, some SAP or some other tools might not be as available and we would have to build some custom solution. Of course, rather than the customized adapter, we would prefer to go with a standardized one. It really just depends on the environment.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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.

Our use case is for its different modular compartments. We have different target integrations with different applications such as Ariba, Concur, Workday, where we're using the connectors to connect to those applications. We're using both mechanisms and lookups and the database systems that come with OIC. We've started our DVC simple config and have integrated that database. We pulled from Ariba and Concur and pushed it into the database and we've done some mappings and changes. We're exploring more features of OIC to see what else we can use. Right now it is in lookups connections and integration, we're planning to use ATP for our transactions in the future. 

We also use the Visual Studio Builder and embed some customizations into this app. We will be using the VPN that comes through the Oracle PaaS and that's the strategy right now. We need to complete a final evaluation before deciding in which direction to proceed. We're customers of Oracle and I'm a customer solutions architect. 

In the past, connectors were pretty much the same in all environments. In this instance, the out-of-box integration between Oracle and SAP is really beneficial for us because we have a lot of business events in Oracle cloud and we need to subscribe to them from within the PaaS. It's a very helpful feature for us. The database is also great because it's using tech cloud and we can do a traditional database like securities, which is why we're using the DB system. So there are a few good features, and of course the lookups is also good. That's a cool feature. These features are helpful to us. 

IDCS doesn't currently have a fully fledged workflow feature like they have in OIM for provisioning lifecycle management of the user, which means having to create a user in IDCS, getting approval for the financials and security before pushing into the Oracle Financial Cloud setup. They have a light version for now and that should be improved. If you want to provision a user with IDCS, you need to kick an approval process and rely on PCS for that, which is risky. We are currently using OIM as an on premise application, where you get the full suite of approval and don't have to go to other cloud applications. That's lacking in ICS. 

There's no out-of-the-box solution like OIM in IDC. There's also no in-built hierarchy for approval. You can't directly use your HR hierarchy for the approval process. It requires writing custom approval policies and maintaining the provision to do that. More approvals features would be good.

Finally, there are two options of database. You can bring your own license, or take the enterprise license and use it as a loan license which unfortunately costs. Given that we're already paying for the database enterprise, why should we go and pay again for the PaaS. We've asked about that but haven't had a good response. 

We've been using this solution for the last five months. 

I believe the solution is stable. 

We're not in production, but they've said that as long as we're not using the VM for any services, they will automatically scale it. There are a few from my team using the solution and also some developers. It will be extended as we move forward to our development and QA, UAT stage. We currently have up to 25 users but we know we can have 300 or 400. 

We're already talking to technical support and they are investigating some of our issues. They've been able to solve some things but not others. 

The initial setup was tricky. When we integrate with Concur, there were some errors and nobody knew why. Eventually we found the solution but it took some time - the solution doesn't handle all the characters that a password could have, which is a small thing. Sometimes we also need to manually restart the virtual machine because some script can run through and doesn't automatically come up. That's a problem. We're struggling with the small virtual machines. We have a system integrator in our team, but we're not quite at that stage yet. 

In general, the solution is functioning well. We already have Informatica Cloud established and we've been using it for a few years as our integration tool. We bought PaaS specificlaly for this project. Our challenge now is to test the comparison between Informative Cloud and PaaS. Informatica is a set price whereas PaaS has the meter running every time the database is extended in the virtual machine. On the other hand PaaS has the front client, the workflow, Ariba, everything. We're still evaluating.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

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.

My use cases involve integrations and connecting to databases and REST services using REST adapters.

As a technical person, I find most of the features valuable, but I particularly like the drag-and-drop feature for designing integrations and processes.

In designer mode, sometimes the browser closure or other unknown issues can cause strange behavior, which requires a restart. I've also experienced issues with caching.

It's been around four years since I started working with it. I am using the latest version because cloud versions get updated in the background frequently.

I have never seen any issue with stability.

Scalability is a complex thing, as when we scale with more instances and requests, there will be costs attached to it. However, OIC can be scaled and it scales automatically.

The customer service and support team is good. Sometimes we had issues achieving certain functionalities, and we contacted support for assistance.

Positive

The initial setup is super easy. Most of the setup is super easy nowadays, with just a few clicks. Whether it's in space creation or configuration, I find it's a nice feature.

The deployment process is all CICD and it doesn't take much time, maybe within half an hour, we can deploy one application or promote from one environment to another environment.

The pricing models vary, and they can be per-message, fact-based, or incident-based. So, there are different pricing models available for users. 

I would definitely recommend using the solution. 

Based on my understanding, I would rate it eight out of ten. There are still features that could or should be added, and I believe it is still evolving.

My company implements this solution for our customers. The solution is typically used for any financial or supply chain implementation. We don't do it stand-alone; we typically do it with the Oracle ERP implementation. We use it to do all of the orchestration in and out of our ERP.

As a consulting firm, the biggest advantage is that it is a low-code platform. People are able to scale up, learn it quickly, and start delivering.

There is a limitation with the file size that Oracle Integration Cloud Service can read and transform. If an inbound file is larger than one GB, it cannot be transformed within Oracle. In cases where we face that limitation, we have to use other solutions that can handle higher volumes. 

For each delivery, we use it in conjunction with Oracle OIC, which is another Oracle product, and they could make it easier for us to query the underlying data, at least with the Oracle tables. It is a tedious task and we have to write VIP reports and get that data via web services, so that is something that they can improve.

I have been working with this product for the past three and a half years. 

This product is definitely scalable. It suits enterprise companies and small companies. Day-to-day middleware users would not use this solution, just technical users on the IT team.

The solution doesn't require much setup. After provisioning, the instance is good to go as soon as the connections are set up. From the provisioning and setup perspective, it is pretty simple and easy.

It takes around one hour for us to provision the instance and start setting it up. Then, once we have the instance available, we can start configuring it as per our requirements. The product is deployed in the cloud. Oracle gives you flexibility for how you can host it, so it can be on your private network or on a public network. 

The price is fair. 

I would rate this solution as a seven out of ten.