Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

• OSB Administration Console
• Error/Exception Management Framework

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

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

4 years

8

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

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

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

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

We use two components within SOA suite:

• Oracle Service Bus
• Oracle SOA Suite (BPEL)

It covers all uses for services with and without states. This solution is an Enterprise Service Bus for company strategy with all the expected features

• Scalabity
• Robustness
• Performance
• Cache
• Administration.

Its strength is its consistency and compliance with the Java Enterprise Edition standard and the underlying application servers.

The bus virtualizes services with OSB (Oracle Service Bus) as it guarantees a secure and holding performance with throttling downstream. It allows us to hide systems like SAP, AS400 and more modern systems.

SOA Suite takes over the services with states or necessitates fine tracking offered in combination with Enterprise Manager.

This version supports Maven for the first time. Some features need to be added for a complete support. A system trace for Oracle support would be useful.

We've been using this version since 2015.

Some customers mix concepts services with and without states. The state management in the BPEL engine of SOA Suite requires persistence in DB and reduces the expected performance. It is very important to activate it when needs dictate.

It's been stable during the time we've been using it.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The quality of support is not always equivalent. In general, it must improve.

The initial setup has been improved with this version 12.1. Development environments are autonomous and faster to use and to deploy.

However, the Oracle solution is based on a JEE architecture which teams must mastered. Otherwise the length of growing competence is long.

I attend implementations at customers with their teams. Their feedback is that during deployment, it has

• Robustness
• Performance
• Rich functionality

The largest customer has more than four million hits a day on its Oracle SOA Suite infrastructure.

I compared this solution to others. The Oracle SOA Suite solution respects Java bases with WebLogic. It allows us to build ESB and BPEL solutions on known technologies and mastered by systems teams. It has a corporate problem as its capacity for scalability, robustness and orchestration require a dedicated infrastructure base. I suggest other solutions to my clients based on their needs.

It is a very good ESB if your team has JEE knowledge.

1. Easy to install and configure SOA 12c development environment by using SOA 12c new Quick Start Installer. There is no need to think of creating a database to store repository of SOA to use this particular installer. It is now possible to install and configure an environment for a developer under 30 to 45 minutes.
2. Number of changes in Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control with redesign of SOA dashboards to focus on consolidated view of faults and issues in system. It helps in troubleshooting and health check of a SOA system.
3. Enterprise Scheduler Service (ESS) is newly introduced in SOA 12c. It helps to schedule SOA components or services and manages the complete lifecycle of a job. It is now possible to schedule activation or deactivation of pooling adapters at specified time to optimize performance of system in peak hours.

I've been working with SOA 12c for over 1 year and it's previous version ,SOA 11g for over 3 years.

The deployment process is well documented and available on the OTN site. No issues observed apart of one observation of SOA managed server taking longer time to start. It appears to be a known bug in this SOA version. The issue was resolved by enforcing managed server to startup by adding startup parameter for IPv4(java.net.preferIPv4Stack=true)

It is a very stable product.

No issues noticed.

Excellent.

Excellent.

It is very easy to set up a development environment by using Quick Installer.

The effort and complexity remain same for traditional setup of production or test build as we used to have in it's previous version 11g.

The complexity increases with implementation of high availability environment in expected line.

In-house.

As a consultant working on both 11g and 12c , I will strongly recommend customers move to 12c as soon as possible and leverage the huge number of new features the product provides in the 12c version.

It has an easy-to-use interface for development. SOA also includes many in-built technology adapters to connect and integrate with different technology servers.

This product has helped a lot with major integrations with different partners and clients. It's now easy to manage customers, order, bills, invoices, etc. We depend on it for registering devices and to sync their data. For example, we sell hardware devices that need pass codes for activation. To do this, we were using a third-party software/web service. With the SOA suite, we can activate the devices ourselves in no time.

As this is not the best product, it comes with minor or major bugs which Oracle keeps improving from time to time. For example, it loads and works slowly, using huge amounts of CPU and RAM. It'd like to see it work more smoothly in the next versions. Also, the support system could be improved, as tickets keep rolling, shift by shift for many days.

I've used it for five years.

If everything if fine at code level, there are no deployment issues.

There are some stability issues. On a few occasions, it behaves abnormally and technical support is unable to come up with a proper solution. Just looking at logs and changing config files is not proper debugging.

Also, we have a specific Oracle SOA server that is not very stable even after following their best practices (which are sometimes very hard to follow).
But it's not a bad software, you just need a good admin to run it.

It scales sufficiently for us.

Customer service is good.

Technical support I would rate at 6-7 out of 10.

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup was not very straightforward and is a bit complex. During initial setup, many things need to be taken care of -- DB installation, dehydration store version, number of CPUs, RAM size, heap size, Java versions and their conflicts, and many other configurations. We have to follow each step carefully, and it's not the same for all servers.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

I can't say what the ROI is. I don't work in that area.

You have to have patience and struggle with it, as with all technologies!

It allows for our integrations with SOA Suite via the API, which we've found to be very agile. We're also able to start integrating through some web services through the ABS system.

We now have a place that allows our integration to happen, whether that's through the agile API running that process or by having our web team develop something that reaches back into the database to grab data. This is important because we often have customers who come to our website to inquire about their orders. But because we don't have to keep two sets of data, we're able to just reach into the database to find out where the data is about customers' orders.

While the product is technically good, my biggest complaint is that there's a lack of the ability to find good support in the IT community for it. This isn't an issue with Oracle support, but rather with finding someone who manages it and who knows what's going on with it. It doesn't seem to be the usual Oracle product that really takes a bit of skill in order to manage it correctly. There's a market for SOA Suite administrators that's separate from regular DBAs. So that's my biggest complaint -- finding the right community support for it.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

It runs fine without any huge stability issues. It's when we try to use it with certain packages that we are trying to do around the AIP that we had some issues.

We haven't really had to scale it because we're not using it that much yet. We may have plans in the future to.

SOA Suite setup was fine as it installs per their instructions. Our biggest issue we had was with our API integration from agile to EBS. It took us several months to get that up and running correctly, with a lot of escalated Oracle support around that. It was a tough nut to crack but we eventually got there.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

There are different products that can do the same thing. Evaluate your requirements and if you have big plans for integration with Oracle, give it some thought.

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

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

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

I've been using it for seven years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

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

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Oracle is providing good support for this tool.

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

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

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

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

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

• Reusability of services
• Scalability

We have implemented SOA for many clients. The organizations are getting benefit as they are eliminating complex integration (point to point) among several legacy systems, and having a low cost solution. The reusability of services is a game changer because one of our clients is saving big money by eliminating extraneous legacy systems.

There is a dashboard available in SOA Suite, and it's called BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), however, very often, clients need more customization, and this is limited. I want more customization in BAM.

I've been using it for two years.

There are many issues in deployment, and it is an ongoing process of improvement in any product. We get support from Oracle to resolve these issues.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

There is a good customer support available and it depend on the severity of the issue.

Initial setup is straightforward and there is plenty of documentation available on the Oracle website to help you with it.

We have an in-house team that did it.

It is always good if there is a win-win situation for client and service providers, and there is definitely some room for improvement in this area.

There are many factors that meant we chose this product over others, including its low cost, variety of integration options, and virtualization through Oracle Service Bus.

Perform a proper requirement gathering and check where this product is best suited in your organization.

• Ease of development, the IDE (JDeveloper) is intuitive and well designed for developing SOA composites.
• The technology adapters which provide connectivity to messaging systems, databases, and file systems all enable you to quickly integrate these components into your composite.
• The product includes a well designed mediator (filtering, routing, transformation) component combined with a powerful BPEL engine all packaged as part of a SCA framework.

It has enabled quick development of integration interfaces between multiple systems (legacy and new). A proof of concept can be put together fairly rapidly.

The installation of the product is fairly cumbersome. The user interfaces for viewing data flows (consoles) seem to lag under load. Application server thread management can be improved.

The product is stable if implemented properly.

It would depend on who you reach in Support. Sometimes issues get resolved quickly and some other times there is a long back and forth. The Oracle Support Portal provides some useful pointers to common issues.

Installation is not a product strength as mentioned above. Depending on the components that you install and the scope of your project, things can get a bit complicated.

We implemented it with a mixed team. Read the documentation and Oracle Support portal notes. Design error handling and monitoring upfront. Decide on your underlying Database infrastructure based on data volume and anticipated load.

The organization has evaluated other products, but felt that this is a more mature middleware platform solution. It met many of our needs.

The only advice I can give is to just make sure that you are very familiar with the products and the services that they offer. Ensure there is someone involved who is familiar with the product and its features for the implementation of an Enterprise Software solution.