Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

• 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.

With relation to integrations, we have a few cloud solutions. We have Salesforce which we need to connect to. We have Taleo, an Oracle recruiting tool. So to connect to both of those, we try to use the SOA Suite.

The SOA Suite is a very reliable solution. We have a clustered environment, like in our production instance. So even if one of the services, or one of the clusters goes down, we still have the other cluster remaining up. So we are very happy with the SOA Suite.

Right now, we plan to go into the 12C version of it, at this point, we're doing a side-by-side upgrade. We like a few features of the 12C version which we are coming up with. The Salesforce adapter, which comes along with it, and as we keep growing and want to add more services, we will be looking at the new features which are available in 12C.

As of right now, currently we do not have too many composites. We have probably around 20 composites in each instance. We have three different domains. If we need to scale it higher, we should be able to do that pretty nicely.

We haven't encountered too much trouble, architecturally, as an issue. What we have had is developer issues, but we have our partner who takes of that. So we had them create the Oracle SR and take care of it.

We keep wanting to be at the top of the industry level. So that's the reason we keep going to the latest solutions available, and Fusion Middlware is one of them.

We had another partner, because we had no idea about SOA Suite. So we had another offshore vendor who helped us do the initial configuration, sessions of going through the architecture sessions and now we have become comfortable with it.

At this point, since we are now an Oracle shop, we were only looking at the Oracle SOA Suite. And we had to integrate a SOA gateway as part of EBS, but that wasn't an entire solution for our SOA needs. But SOA Suite provides us with that, and that's how we went there.

I would rate it an 8. The reason being, I didn't want to give it a higher rating is because it's a little bit complex. It takes a little bit of time to get used to it, and to figure out and find the actual developers who can work on the solution. Like the processes and stuff. And that's basically why I would rate it a 8.

The features of this product that are most valuable to me are the dashboard creation ability of BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) product. Also the flexibility of using the JDeveloper development tool for web service and Oracle Service Bus development.

One example of how this product has improved my organization functions is in the shortening of the development time to market in delivering custom solutions. Another example is in the technical agility and flexibility to adapt to business process change that happens at a very fast pace in companies daily.

One area for improvement that I would like to see change in the next release is in the JDeveloper toolset. Occasionally, when you have open to many windows the tool acts erratic and has memory leaks.

I have used this solution since 2010-2011 for various companies. Also across different industries I have been successful to develop and implement solutions using this toolset.

One of the main issues is figuring out how to do what you want in the toolset.
The documentation occasionally misses steps. OSB development can get tricky

I have encountered the occasional JDeveloper memory leak.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Oracle customer service is very helpful. The website is full of on demand tutorials and documentation.

The Initial setup of the product is straightforward as long as you do your pre-planning and follow the prerequisites. Also, occasionally you encounter an issue that requires that a ticket be created with support or independent research must be done to resolve the issue (i.e. search the web or read blogs for missing steps.)

I have implemented the solution as a mixed implementation between vendor resources and in house. This model has been used at all my implementations across industries. My advice would be to identify your pre-requisites and also hold pre-planning meetings to identify business and technical requirements.

I have previously investigated other products in the quadrant and I choose to align myself with the Oracle SOA Suite. This is due to the robust features available and the scalability of the product suite.

My advice for people looking to implement this product is that training is a must.
You have to make that investment in your in-house resources to be successful in supporting the product. If they fix the memory leak issues with JDeveloper toolset and make the training needed less intensive I would give it a 10/10.

• Integration Adapters
• Oracle Web Service Manager
• Oracle Web Service Manager security polices
  Enterprise Management
• Meta datastore
• BPEL

In the company I work, we specialize in integration solutions. With this, we are able to perform quick deliveries and clients are happy that their time to market is reduced. Prototyping a solution with this is very simple.

We've been using it for four years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We faced some issues, particularly in clustered environments.

We haven't needed to scale it.

Through the Oracle Technology Network, we were able to get decent technical support.

The initial set up was easy, as there are lot of resource available online.

Spring Integration and Tibco were evaluated ,considering the following parameters we chose Oracle SOA suite becaue -

• Wide Range of Integration adapters compared to others
• Less time to market
• GUI based IDEBetter resource pool - there are more people in the market with Oracle skills
• Most clients prefer Oracle products as they were already using other products particularly E-Business Suite

Go for Oracle SOA Suite if you have complex integration scenarios or there is a need to service your legacy systems. Never implement a business functionality in Oracle SOA suite and it has to be purely used for VETRO (Validation, Enrichment, Transformation, Routing, and Orchestration). It is not recommended for start ups to build their IT infrastructure.

Oracle SOA 12c comes with many new features mostly for developers to deliver integrations rapidly.

Saving the BPEL. The activities as templates is the most common use case I have used whilst in development. This enables us to adhere to corporate standard for developing integrations. Unlike SOA 11g where we used to copy paste code, SOA12c templates makes it easy for developers.

The Managed File Transfer (MFT) is a great addition to the product set managing all our file transfer capability, encryption, decryption, monitoring, visibility and resubmission of transfer. It integrates with SOA Suite seamlessly.

For Oracle Service Bus, there is no more Eclipse and only a single JDeveloper for all development and EM consoles for monitoring.

REST support for both SOA and OSB greatly enhance the product capability for mobile and cloud integration. Inbuilt continuous integration capability through JDeveloper. It has more adapter support for cloud integration than before.

For one of the customer where an on-premise application needed to be integrated with cloud, the integration is done using SOA Suite, reducing the development time due to the use of templates. Also, MFT handles all kinds of secure file exchange reducing the cost for having and managing multiple FTP servers. The same templates are used for other customers too reducing further our development time and delivering quality product.

For REST support, the product internally converts to a SOAP WSDL format, and I would like to see the product only work to REST standards. It would be nice if we could rename a SOA composite feature and have pre-built templates with best practises implemented.

I've been using it for the last seven years, and 12c for the last 10 months.

We have encountered no issues with its stability.

It’s a scalable application.

I have never used any other product.

For trying out a developer edition, the installation was easy unlike previous versions. The automatic upgrade from 11g to 12c was not painful.

We implemented it on our own.

You should use the new MFT, templates, REST features, and cloud adapters to get the best out of it.

The best feature is that it's one integrated product and very supportive of different technologies, so it supports the best-standard products such as SOA, BPM, and PeopleSoft. These are industry standards, not just Oracle standards. Once you deploy and build solutions on top of it, you have stability. So if you move away from Oracle, you can reuse a lot of the integration and the thought that was behind it. The second part is it has support for an amazing number of technologies as well as business adapters, so it can make your integration very easy and seamless.

If I have to be very precise, I would say that is one of the best integration platforms in terms of the fact that it has support from pretty much every technology as well as business connections available. For instance, imagine if you want to connect your EBS with Salesforce. You can do it through SOA Suite using all those adapters. Similarly, if you're to connect your Salesforce with any other hundred million cloud-based apps, you can do all of it using out-of-the-box cloud adapters that SOA Suite provides.

The product is very capable, it has a lot of features, but that makes it very complex to manage, maintain, install, patch, and monitor. Since we are moving into an age of DevOps and smart automation I'd like Oracle to invest in ways where it can improve the developer productivity and the way our infrastructure can be managed, self-healed, self-monitored, and give you indications of where the lights are on or off. There are different products at the moment, but that means integrating with those products again. If you step into that thing, you have to buy five different products from Oracle and include them all together to have this functionality achieved. If it's such a good platform for middleware, it should have those features as well.

The platform historically has had stability issues with every new release. The platform moved from 10g to 11g, had around seven releases in 11g, then moved to 12c, with a further five releases in 12c. These issues are then addressed through a lot of patches and patch sets, and that's a problem with the platform. A lot of times it's a combination of a platform and an application which can cause stability issues. We've seen a lot of stability issues with Oracle Server Suite when they release new versions.

SOA Suite is not so much for the number of users. It's for the number of integrations that you process, as the metric is different. You don't use SOA Suite with end users in mind, as it's an integration platform. It has support for a wide number of applications from legacy mainframes to modern ones such as Salesforce.

SOA Suite is a bit challenging. SOA Suite has a lot of products inside it but they're all bundled together. You have the option of bundling them all together when you're installing and then adding additional components once you've installed. That process is straightforward, but it is very complicated. It is straightforward for demos, but when it comes to enterprise-grade deployment, it is very complicated.

With a lot of cloud applications coming in, the dimensions of integration is changing. Integration is not just between systems on premise, but it is also between systems on-premise and in the cloud. And, again between systems within the cloud. So WebLogic, and SOA Suite together are not sufficient to handle all these integrations. It has been proven to support integration which are on-premise to cloud, and then cloud-to-cloud integration, so the dimensions of integration are changing. Invest in how you would use SOA Suite over other cloud-based integration suites such as ICS and have a clear strategy about when do you use which integration platform.

As middleware, SOA Suite helps us to perform a lot of EDA transactions. We connect and deliver B2B data to SOA Suite through Silverlight. We're going to upgrade our version soon as we're very happy with it.

The modules of SOA Suite are hot-pluggable, so we can make changes to our IT infrastructure and architecture without having to replace existing or to buy new components.

There are a lot of features that we aren't using, though we're already using the management tools to help us manage our transactions. But, there are some features that aren't available to us, and we're hoping that when we upgrade, there will be additional management features to help us more.

We have been using it for the last seven to eight years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability is good. We've had no issues with instability.

We don't need to scale it as we haven't needed to yet.

In our experience, the technical support has been excellent.

My advice is to buy it and use it. It's a great product.

The most valuable features for us are the integration with Oracle Fusion middleware products and the native support.

Bringing all the data to central warehouse and generating reports that helps business to forecast business strategy is one of the most useful features.

We have manual sales order processing for customers and book new PO to supplier. Using Oracle forecasting tools and SOA Suite we have integrated our Order Management System and Forecasting System. BI reports helps business users to generate report and raise PO accordingly to fill the demand supply gap.

I'd like to see more plug-and-play adapters, preferably similar to Cloud Integration's browser-based adapter. It saves time to cope with the ever growing business and to meet requirements in more a more agile manner.

We've been using it for the last eight years. Alongside SOA Suite, we're using Oracle AIA 11.1.1.7, ODI 11.1.1.7, OBIEE 11.1.1.9, Oracle Data Quality, OER, OSR, PeopleSoft, Oracle Applications 12R, Deloitte and Accenture are our implementation partners.

We have always seen issues around integration tools and it's difficult to resolve issues sometimes when things pile up.

We've had no issues with stability.

An effective alert mechanism needs to be put in place for deployment and to help scale environments.

Existing bugs have been identified proactively. However, in several SRs, we have seen intermittent delays for new products.

Our older systems were IBM Mainframe and SeeBeyond Solutions for integration between other systems. We have chosen the product from the stability and brand value.

The installation was very straightforward. We have encountered issues in the production environment for missing several configuration where we spent more time in streamlining all the environments.

We hired Oracle for a few of our implementations when we were setting up our in-house team. We began implementing with vendors and later on formed an internal team with knowledge transition. If you're a company that does not have COE in the areas that you are implementing, it's advisable to consult the vendor team for industry experts and gradually move the technology over.

Oracle does offer a competitive licensing price if you are purchasing a suite of products from them to maximize the ROI. However, if anyone chooses selective products from the stack, the percentage of ROI is less.

In our enterprise, we have a mix of products and each product helps the business in different ways. It's advisable to measure the business needs first and then plan for the implementation, because once implementation starts with an older version by the time it stabilizes, the stack needs to be upgraded. Oracle product upgrades are not very straightforward. Sometimes there is a slight unwillingness from the stakeholders to stay on the updated version rather than continuing with the existing.