Oracle Integration Cloud Service Reviews

Integration of SaaS solutions that form systems of reference. Exposing simplified APIs to digital front ends.

Expoit its deep integration to Oracle apps and SaaS so we can have event driven integration.

Take advantage of the rich catalogue of prebuilt integration adaptors covering RPA, SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow etc etc

Integration of cloud & on-premises solutions  (hybrid model) supporting secured remote access to on-premises data sources.

The integration of cloud solutions and realizing Hybrid intergrations with existing on-premises solutions has become far easier (compared to SOA suite).

The movement from ICS to Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) has meant the introduction of additional capabilities which will be of positiver value such as Visual Cloud builder, scaling restrictictions of ICS removed.

• The simplicity and ease of creating SOAP and REST endpoints and integrating with them. New features being added regularly to make it a significant integration platform.

Some of the adapters could be enhanced to make integration even simpler.

The example I would use is the GMail interface - it requires Base64 encoded content. But to make the interface simpler, the API should provide the encoding and the adapter simply accept plain text.

Depending on our customer upto 4 years

No stability issues.

There are volumetric constraints today driven by licensing, but we haven't encountered an issue with this. However, people should consider them before signing up.

Customer Service:

The solution is self-serve, so little contact is necessary. When we have spoken to Oracle (more to ask questions about future features), we have had friendly, helpful engagement.

Technical Support:

Technical support is good

SOA. Adopting ICS with JCS offers a cost effective and flexible platform

Initial setup was a piece of pie.

Own team

Agility, now middleware deployment challenges (excluding agents - but they are pretty simple)

Look at volumetric and the number of different connections

Other Oracle integration options that can help with hybrid use cases

Look carefully at the adaptors, they aren't always fully featured when announced.

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.

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.

The primary use case of the solution is integration for clients.

The flexibility for bringing in different streams without depending on the architecture is the solution's most valuable feature.

There could be much improvement in integration and automation within the solution.

The solution needs better dashboarding. There should be reports on running reloads, how things are being deployed and what's in the pipeline. If there was a nice dashboard to have a look at this information, that would allow for more control of the tool itself.

From a performance perspective, there could be more improvements done.

The stability of the solution is good.

Many think that they can use OICS as an ETL tool, which is not true. There are other offerings from Oracle that offer that, they just need this layer to bring in data and process data.

I would rate the scalability seven out of ten.

We did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. Deployment time varies depending on the size of the company. 

It really depends on the size of the project and the size of the data we'll be dealing with, but for deployment and maintenance, we have a team of three people. The bigger the company, the bigger the team you will need for maintenance. 

We mostly use the private cloud deployment model.

I would recommend that new users not just dump all the data streams into the tool. Rather they should start small and then scale it depending on the use cases.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten. It's one of the very good counter price integration tools available on the cloud right now.

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.

We are using Oracle Integration Cloud Service to enhance application features. We have only started and we are going to do it one by one.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service integrates well and is user-friendly. If you are not a developer or ops engineer you can still use the solution with ease. You do not need to have developers' knowledge, you can easily adapt and learn quickly to integrate the services. They have good documentation.  

There are a few features that we noticed are not in the cloud. There are some improvements needed. One example is the graphical user interface that needs to improve, it could be easier to use.

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

Since we have been using Oracle Integration Cloud Service we have not had any problems. I am not sure what the future will bring, but it has been great. AWS was down for a period of time and no one expected it. There were outages for Azure and Oracle cloud. We cannot predict the future, no one can be certain about the stability of these solutions.

We might see some interruptions in the future. They're doing a very good job because they're expanding their regions. Recently they opened three to four regions, Italy, India, and a few in the Middle East. I don't think there will be any scaling problems or availability problems in the future for Oracle. 

The solution is scalable.

For those who have Oracle on-premise, Oracle Cloud is the best solution because when we tried to migrate to Azure and Google cloud, we could not meet their expectations.

The native Oracle application can easily migrate to Oracle Cloud. If you're trying to migrate to AWS, Google, or Azure, we need a lot of effort and there are is a challenge to redesign everything. If it is a popular application, it is a bit tough to redesign applications to be compatible with Azure, Google, or AWS.  

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

I use the solution for system integration with different applications.

The solution has helped our organization properly frame the integration with different platforms.

The solution provides efficient integration with multiple platforms.

They should include more integration for the solution with other platforms. Also, they should provide tutorials for beginners to learn about the processes.

I have been using the solution since 2019.

The solution is stable and has a high availability.

The solution is scalable.

We have a support contract with Oracle. They offer good technical support.

The solution generates ROI for our organization.

The solution is expensive. But its excellent quality of integration makes it worth the buy.

The solution is excellent. I rate it a ten out of ten.

I work for a product-based company and all our projects are carried out in-house. I'm an architect and work as an IT technical lead.

The best features of this product are around the ease of building an integration, the ability to make changes, and management following development. 

I'd like to see features for more complex integrations that require different sources and destinations in an all-in-one integration. ICS is currently less flexible than SOAR and that could also be improved. The product also lacks options for writing code and logic and that's where the flexibility is lacking. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

We sometimes have downtime without any prior notice, but it doesn't happen often and lasts for a very short amount of time. 

The scalability is good. 

The technical support from Oracle is pretty good and has improved a lot in the last few years. 

The initial setup is easy and if you don't have a very complex integration, then it's a very good tool. 

Their licensing costs are very competitive, especially in comparison to integration tools like MuleSoft or IBM offer. The cost may seem high initially, but they offer good discounts.

I rate this solution eight out of 10.