Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

We use this solution for complex integrations between disparate systems that can be done securely, as light-weight services, automation, recovery, robust ETL options, and a lot more.

Comparing with other integration products, Oracle SOA Suite, being offered by Oracle Corporation, brings along a lot of benefits like Cloud and Database features that are an integral part of their offering.

This solution is specifically suitable for applications or systems that would not provide any option to share data or integrate with each other. Having data from applications like a parking system imported into the financial system reduces the revenue processing cycle by ninety percent, with the added benefits of automation, security, and reliability.

Oracle SOA Suite has been in use for more than a decade at our organization and has provided a lot of benefits across the departments.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the option to design, and the development can happen at the same time. Also, it can be done by business users as Oracle SOA Suite allows designing the logical flows that get translated into the actual implementation for the integration.

We have automated incident reporting and closure for critical applications, which is a function that has been very valuable. 

With respect to the feature that allows each process to be accessible and reviewed at a later time, it is a great debug option, but we did notice the database size getting larger by the day. Is there any option available that will allow the process history to be moved to a different schema? If so, it would not affect the performance.

If the disk space expansion can be made more flexible, not requiring a database restart, it would be a major benefit.

We have evaluated MuleSoft and other ETL products. We found Oracle SOA Suite to be the most suitable for our needs, with Cloud features and Database compatibility.

Nowadays I work for a retail company, and we deliver SOA Suíte 12c to integrate SAP Hybris REST API with legacy systems. Before, I used to work for a telecom company, and we used OSB and BPEL to integrate IVR with legacy systems.

SAP Hybris e-commerce needed to access orders, customers, inventory and products data on SQL server database. We developed a REST API using BPEL and OSB. We also use BPEL to integrate Oracle Retail V14 to legacy systems.

• SOAP and REST services implemented with BPEL
• Database/JMS/file adapters and authentication policies
• Proxy, business services and pipelines of Oracle Service Bus.

The product is very good considering tracing, ease of use and troubleshooting.

However, the development environment requires a big machine with potent CPU/memory, and SOA server takes many minutes to be up, you can't run anything else on the computer.

In production, when you have lots of composites running on the SOA server, it takes up to 30 min to restart the server.

Microservice was created to solve these weaknesses of standard SOA approach.

You need a qualified team to support production environments.

Good performance when using cluster environment.

yes, Mule ESB.

High price, now with Oracle cloud, there are more options of pricing.

The client already had the Oracle license.

Check also Oracle ICS and PCS on the cloud.

My first application was in the planning of integral projects in a state university where we made a profile proposing the integral installation of communications, and built an edifice for the data center with a nutanix server. We created software sheltering the existing ideas, and the SOA web service facilitated this work.

Oracle SOA Suite allows for integrated systems and facilitates report making for quick decision making, although the bad administrative management software is on Microsoft platforms, while free software with MySql. However, it was decided to align the academic and administrative systems to Microsoft platforms.

Many years ago I started doing intermediate software that allows database sharing of different manufacturers based on Microsoft Access data and DBF or SQL Server databases.

This solution should allow for data output to spreadsheets and other formats. During training, it is necessary to be closer to the end user to properly manage the product.

We position Oracle SOA Suite as the central on-premises integration platform, to integrate existing on-premises systems with each other. Furthermore, it is used in upcoming hybrid architectures, where Cloud-based systems and Cloud-native apps, need to be integrated with the existing on-premises applications.

The product allows you to visualize how a company is working currently by providing rich possibilities for analysis such as the audit trails and therefore shows where improvements might be valuable. This becomes more and more important for companies to differentiate themselves from competitors.

A definitive differentiator is the very good integration capability the platform provides: It has a broad spectrum of connectivity adapters to integrate with third party enterprise information systems, like SAP, Siebel, and JD Edwards, and also cloud solutions like Salesforce.

In addition, the platform comes with a standalone, first-class Service Bus component that can be used for service virtualization. This enables customers to create and edit new integrations efficiently and helps to adopt new trends or concepts, like cloud, very fast.

Aside from that, the platform also addresses business needs (process automation with BPEL), allows to further transparency for business transactions (audit trails, Business Activity Monitoring) and provides rich capabilities in the direction of fault handling and resiliency.

EDIT: In the newest version (12.2.1.1), Real-Time Integration Business Insight is directly included. Isights allows to declaratively define monitoring milestones for complete business process flows, without touching the implementation. The declared monitoring model can be adjusted at any time at runtime and the data can be displayed in different ways using different dashboard components. Another great thing to achieve more visibility regarding how business is performing.

The Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which is JDeveloper in this case. Also, the integrated development environment could be better in some points such as the stability and the comprehensibility of errors.

EDIT: The Maven integration in JDeveloper is very basic and might be enhanced to allow the proper use of Maven.

There have been no issues aside from the local development environment.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The level of technical support is satisfactory, but it depends highly on the affected components and on the way the error can be described and what information can be provided, e.g. by providing a reproducer or a detailed error log.

There is also a lot of documentation. In addition, the development community is also responsive and provides a lot of information in the form of blog posts, webcasts, and presentations.

There was nothing in place previously.

The initial setup is neither straightforward nor complex. It always depends on the specific situation, like the available IT system landscape, the already existing applications, and the needs of a project.

The platform as such can be installed following best practices provided by the vendor, such as the Enterprise Deployment Guide. Oracle partners also provide tools that support you in infrastructure setup and maintenance.

It is necessary to evaluate the requirement regarding the platform usage and what the main operation area of the platform will be. Because depending on that, the initial sizing of the infrastructure has to be done. Typical questions are:

• How many instances do you expect per day/month/year?
• What is the average amount of data?
• Should the environment have High Availability?
• What kind of integrations/processes will you have - stateless or stateful, long running processes derived from the requirements, and evaluated at the very beginning?

A topology blueprint should be created and validated against these requirements.

No other options have been evaluated.

Collect your requirements and be clear with what you need. Before starting a concrete project or even before doing the final sizing, talk with others who have already implemented the solution or have reliable experience in this area. This will help you to get things right from the beginning and help you to avoid running into pitfalls. Do not undersize the environment and always keep in mind what will come in the future.

The product can be used to build a company's robust foundation regarding a enterprise-wide integration platform without hesitation, which we already did in different project contexts. Because the platform helps to solve complex problems, it is complex itself and so not that easy to understand and to learn. The learning curve is high accordingly.

EDIT: To ensure robustness and easy changeability of the developed services and components, my recommendation is to set up a Continuous Integration (CI) environment as a first step in every project. The CI environment is the central platform for automated test executions as well as for deployment automation and is - from my point of view - absolutely needed to succeed with complex integration implementations.

Integrations.

It simplifies integration.

Cost and scalability.

I think it's quite stable.

Scalability is medium, mainly because of cost.

Technical support has been good.

The setup was not really straightforward. I think it was medium complex.

Oracle, Dell Boomi, Software AG.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor are cost and scalability.

I rate this solution at seven out of 10 because there are better options out there, but it also depends on cost.

Compare and make sure it fits your requirements, because there's no perfect solution. Make sure that you understand what you need and go for that.

Developing middleware with an EC platform, which enables our Product Manager to post products to different outside EC platforms with only one interface and one process.

With Oracle SOA, middleware jobs developing for the EC, ERP, and shipping systems become easier.

• Oracle Cloud Adapter for Oracle ERP Cloud
• Oracle Cloud Adapter for Salesforce
• Oracle Managed File Transfer

The installation and adjustment process seems too complex. Would it be possible for the software to be installed in a short click?

Conceptually, how it integrates a lot of essential enterprise process components. That's the most valuable.

It consolidates various other software applications into the one solution.

The interface is too complicated. Making modifications still requires too much technical knowledge. The user interface needs to be less technical so that business analysts can utilize or develop their process, design their process more easily, without technical knowledge of how SOA Suite works.

We're using it for a minimum of it's capabilities, so no stability problems. But we have talked to various other people who said that when they deploy more components in SOA Suite, they run into more performance issues and the like. We're afraid to do that, so we're staying with the minimal.

It is very scalable.

We have been happy with the response we get. We have a huge license that we own, so Oracle does try to keep us happy.

We used to use SMT, which then became obsolete, so we changed to SOA Suite.

We had high hopes of deploying SOA architecture, which didn't go anywhere because it's a lot of money and effort, so things are on hold. It is too big of solution for us at this point. 

We bought what we bought because of what we thought we were going to use it for. Hindsight, we would have never purchased it. So I would say be very clear and have a good understanding of your roadmap and your business strategy. See where you're going because you could be spending a lot of money for something you don't even utilize.

• The integration with various products
• Seamless integration

It helped in the transfer of data from one system to another.

The web services need to be more robust. Also, the error handling should be improved.

More than four years.

We had several issues.

Most of the time.

Yes.

A four out of 10.

A four out of 10.

No.

The initial setup was complex without proper documentation.

A vendor team did the installation.

Not applicable.

No.

The new product has come out with SOA Cloud Service and Integration Analytics as well, which gives more options for clients to pick their point of requirements.

Real time transactions became easy and I feel the difference in experience.

SOA, OSB, SOA Cloud Service.

Seven years.

Yes, this product is not that stable.

Yes, cloud backups have issues.

Six out of 10.

I have been using the same solution.

Quick Install is quick and easy. It takes less time to install and there is no complexity while navigating through the setup screens.

Oracle pricing is expensive. Support is based on your license. AWS is much better than Oracle in this regard.

No.

No.

Valuable features include web service development and cloud connectivity.

We are using the SOA suite for all cloud integrations.

• SOA
• AP
• AR

We have been using this solution for two years.

There were some connectivity issues.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer service was very good.

Technical support is good.

We did not use a solution previously.

Provides connectivity between discrete systems and has availability. It has more features to connect using connectors and Adapters and also cloud integrations. The re-usability of the services makes it reliable and reduces the development efforts. 

It enables seamless integration and accountability. It has adapters for Salesforce and other cloud adapters. It has the infrastructure to re-process and troubleshoot the failed instances.

Decrease the number of internal resources which the product uses. 

We have been using this solution for ten years.

There were no deployment issues.

In the previous versions, we used to get stability issues. It has improved a lot since then.

There were no scalability issues.

Valuable features include connectors and BAM. 

We need lot of visibility into all the key functions like OM, PO, etc.  We also have lot of systems running on different platforms. SOA was used as a central hub to orchestrate all of that.

I want to see easier integration connections with other cloud-based tools. 

We have been using this for eight years.

There were some issues with deployment. It would help if there were a feature or add-on for connecting major repository versions.

Some of the valuable features of SOA Suite are obviously integration, integrating two different systems together to be able to create web services on top of back end systems and expose those both internally and externally. To be able to do transformation, translation of data so that two proprietary systems can communicate. Also really to be able to create services and APIs that can be able to support business processes as well as consumer and composite applications. Oracle SOA Suite is really designed for those types of features.

Some of the benefits of Oracle SOA are like I was talking about earlier, transformation of fields and data elements. Transaction management as you're integrating two different proprietary systems, being able to manage that transaction and an end-to-end business process.

Orchestration, the ability to be able to apply business rules and different types of rules on top of what your integration and your business processes are. The main benefit is really to integrate proprietary systems that can't naturally communicate with each other through services, through APIs and to be able to reuse those services into composite applications. Be able to reuse those services in workflows, in business processes or whatever the pattern may be. The ability to expose data between these systems as both a provider of information and a consumer of information.

More cloud adoption would be good because SOA Suite has a lot of adoption for a lot of on-premise customers and they're just getting started with the cloud adoption model. We'd also like to see some more lightweight, light-scale versions of it. It's like one of their greatest assets can also be one of their greatest detriments which is it comes so feature-rich in such a big product that it sometimes can be an expensive product. Some customers just want a low-scale, lightweight version of the tool and we see quite a bit of need for that. Some improvements on API management, the ability to create APIs on top of services to manage those and the analytics of those, would be some good features that we'd like to see as well.

Oracle SOA has been a rock solid enterprise-level tool for many years. It's really foundationally built on WebLogic and so it has a lot of scalability built into it. I've seen implementations that support millions of transactions per day, hundreds of trading partners, hundreds of web services and APIs. The scalability and the ability for capacity growth has always been there and has always been a fundamental tenet and one of the fundamental principles of Oracle SOA Suite. Because it is an enterprise service bus, it has to be able to have that level of scalability. The implementations really are dependent on what the customer use cases are. Because it's such a feature-rich product there's a lot you can do with it and there's a lot of good ways to implement SOA and there's a lot of bad ways to implement SOA.

Usually the tipping point is about 25 integrations. If a customer is hand-coding or hand developing their integrations in a custom platform like Java or  .NET. Once you hit about 25 integrations, that's a good time to say, "Hey, I may need more of a commercial platform approach where I can get features such as air handling, login, analytics, transaction management." All these that are built in into a battle-tested product, that's when you start hitting that tipping point. At about 25 integrations is when a customer should begin to look at making that type of investment.

Some of the good ways to implement SOA in a traditional, agile, system development lifecycle is really trying to understand what are the functional use cases. What is the business process that needs the support? Some of the other key aspects are being able to understand what is the universal data model that you're going to be integrating? Right? What are the fields and elements on the back ends' system that's providing the information and what are fields and elements on the consuming system? Then be able to come up with a semantic level, canonical level mapping between those two and be able to create a universal data object. Create a loosely coupled implementation.

Traditionally building integrations does follow a system development lifecycle. Traditionally going through requirements, design sessions, integration, development, testing and so forth, There's a lot of techniques to do those rapidly in an agile-like way but there's also some ways to also blueprint those so that they're well documented, well understood. It helps keep your technical debt low for organizations who have to manage and maintain these over the course of many different years. Oracle SOA is well-designed, it is a product that we've implemented many times over and we've built a lot of best practices to help customers understand the complexity or take some of the complexity out. Because at the end of the day it is a platform, it's not a shrink wrapped solution. It's a platform that you have to be able to build things on and if you're not building things the right way, you can easily create what we call 'spaghetti architecture'. Which is building a bunch of point-to-point integrations between these systems that is not loosely coupled, not reusable and not scalable because they're not following good design patterns. If you're going that approach which unfortunately we see some customers do, then that could get you in trouble. We've got some frameworks and some solutions on how to avoid those types of architectures and designs.

We have a checklist because we actually end up being independent advisors, we've helped a number of customers with evaluation, score carding and selection. Because at the end of the day SOA Suite is not the only product out there. There's other products such as MuleSoft, WSO2, they all have integration platforms too that Oracle is competing with. It really is what platform is the best for the customer? Some of the key criteria, what we see are how easy is it for a developer to build integrations, how quickly can they do it, how quickly can they deploy their applications to products? Does it integrate well with DevOps and version control systems? How robust is their login and analytics? Some of these are key fundamental features for a lot of enterprise-level customers. Those need to work or the customer can really get themselves in trouble if for example a transaction fails. What do I do? If you don't have good features in the product to recover from such situations, that can lead to a lot of headaches for a lot of our Fortune 2000 clients.

Rating: I would give it a solid eight. I want to say ten but nothing is perfect. Gartner does rate it as one of the leading vendors in their quadrants, so that's always good as well. We've seen a lot of adoption, a lot of Oracle customers have bought it and it's got a lot of good features. The reason why I may not give it a nine or 10 are some of the things that we talked about earlier, some of the potential weaknesses around cloud enablement, lightweight enablement, pricing, things like these. That have been a little bit of inhibitors to some of the smaller and medium-sized customers and around API management as well.

From an enterprise service bus, SOA-level product, we definitely think it's one of the leaders out there. We can certainly help a customer with an evaluation and selection, you can learn more at our website, visualintegrator.com. Some of the things I would absolutely look at, at least three to five vendors in this space, come up with your key use cases, your key functional use cases, your key technical use cases, provide waiting criteria on those and scorecard these vendors. Scorecard then on their capabilities, ask them to do a proof of concept, always important. A lot of them will do developer day workshops with you.

Ask them to do something like this and really take a look at a selection of vendors to see what is the best fit for your organization. Because the reality is you have choices out there and SOA Suite maybe the perfect fit for you, it may not be the perfect fit for you. You really have to take a look at it and say, "Does it fit my needs with their features, with their pricing, with support and so forth?" Really do that level of evaluation and selection. That's one of the things we actually incidentally specialize in helping customers with as independent advisors. Certainly if a customer were to do that, those are the things I would certainly focus on.

I think in my role, the most valuable feature of the product is the declarative way of orchestrating your web server engines instead of having to code it all manually.

Once it's in production, for the organization, I think the most valuable feature is it's the ability to track and trace every single message all the way from the beginning to the end.

We're Oracle partners, so we're implementing it for our customers. I think for them it means being able to reuse their current IT assets and having access to that information in their current systems. Another improvement to their organizations is reducing the time to market for building an integration.

It depends a little bit on the perspective. From my perspective, I think the development experience, the refactoring, could be improved. And the way that the design-side metadata storage is implemented.

I think from an organizational perspective, the audit options can be improved by making it easier in terms of business terms. A lot of the new features that they're implementing right now, I think will help that. It's not just technical, but also has more business semantics.

I think I've been using the product since 2007.

It is a stable product. Of course, it's an IT product, so sometimes there's versions that need patches, but the patches are being released regularly. In production, the product is extremely stable. I think sometimes the development tool could have issues, especially with new versions. The first version sometimes needs a patch, but the production environment has always been very stable.

It's an extremely scalable product. We have projects with very high throughput, and also there's a lot of tuning possibilities to make the messages extremely fast.

There are a lot of support resources available: Oracle support, forums, articles, blogs, and product management. We have a close relationship with product management, so we discuss solutions with them. There's the A-Team that can help out. In terms of technical support, there's a lot of possibilities. And then, of course, the partner ecosystem that we are a part of offers a few options, as well.

I think for a developer instance, it's straightforward. You can just follow the wizard and click Next, Next, Next. For production, it's quite complex. For every other element in your IT, because it's an integration product, so naturally it has complexity because you need network connectivity, you need to know what type of storage, you need high availability, and you need to tune it.

I think that one of the things that can ease that is automation of the installation. We use scripts for that, so we don't forget anything. Of course, the other option is the SOA Suite in the cloud. Oracle took away part of the complexity by offering the wizards in the cloud.

With traditional programming languages, you have to build a lot of the web servers and integration stuff manually, which is very error-prone and time-consuming. Compared to that, I think this product is a huge improvement.

I think if you compare it to competitors, it's very strong in the operation side of things because you can track and trace everything very easily, as well as the ease of use of integrations.

There are many facets to this product, but we have primarily been making use of SCA, BPEL, Mediators, and JMS, along with a number of extension products. We are expecting to make extensive use of several other aspects of the SOA (and its containing WebLogic server) in the near future, specifically OSB and Coherence.

It has allowed us to build integrations using an enterprise-class platform. It has also meant that we have been able to purchase prebuilt integrations from Oracle for their products, meaning we have been able to focus largely on our own solutions.

It should be noted, and we have proven with our own experience, that to really get good value out of the product you need to have some good development approaches, as well as knowledgeable people on the team because middleware is very easy to do badly, and then it becomes an impediment. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility.

With the availability of Maven the adoption of Continous Integration can be really driven fowards.

Configuration of the product is a very complex and demands a lot of knowledge, but we do recognize this is the process to pay for a flexible platform. Nevertheless, providing simplified tools for common activities would be very helpful.

My employer has been using Oracle SOA Suite for three to four years. I have been working as an architect for this amount of time as well.

Deployments are complex.

Once correctly configured, scaling and stability have not been an issue. When issues have occurred, we have traced the problems back to poor deployment configuration, particularly environment factors such as the network, etc.

Oracle official support channels can be a bit slow (although no worse then any other significant vendor, e.g. Red Hat). But there is a wealth of information in the Oracle community that can help, and it is possible to seek help through the community if you know how.

Additionally, if you have appropriate contacts within Oracle, then you can reach out that way as well and typically see friendly, responsive engagement.

We have in the past heavily used Red Hat's Fuse products. They're also good, but require a far greater level of investment in good development skills to exploit. The need for more basic development skills has meant the development of the ISO of on-site integration practices.

It's complex for 11g, but in getting started with the new 12c platform, we have seen far greater development although production environment are still a fairly sophisticated task.

The majority of the work we have had done with Oracle SOA Suite has been through a major systems integrator with a few internal individuals with some knowledge for basic operational support. Given the choice, use smaller specialist Oracle partners -- they may cost more per person, but they know how to get the most out of the platform and can deliver a lot more in the same time. The big SIs we have seen approach things with just training staff to use the tools and then assume that is good enough, rather than invest in the underlying principles and support the development of good skills through experience.

Do some upfront work to figure out what you're likely to want to do with the technology and get some meaningful volumetrics before you start negotiating on licensing. The Oracle PaaS platform offers an opportunity to try and see and understand the art of the possible before you start ramping up. Without this, you may find that you buy into license constraints to keep the cost down and then later regret the constraints. Understand how to get the most of the pre-sales engagement. Oracle can offer a lot here to help you bottom out the right solutions to make sure you get it.

If you're starting from scratch with Oracle, seed your team with some resources who have knowledge and reputation. Invest in your own people to develop knowledge in the breadth of the tool. Even if you use SLS to deliver, having some knowledge of your own can help hold them to account. This is most critical if you've engaged them on a fixed-price model as they will want to keep the cost down, which might work to your best interests.

Service orchestration using BPEL and OSB is the feature most used. JMS integration for reliable messaging is probably the most valuable feature.

Pub/Sub is an integration pattern very commonly used. SOA/WebLogic provides easy-to-use JMS services that can be used in BPEL or OSB. This is the only way to guarantee the delivery of messages. Any message that needs guaranteed delivery has to go over JMS.

The product allows loose coupling between applications. We no longer use point-to-point integration or tightly coupled integration. This provides reusability of services and ease of integration.

In the previous 11g release, there wasn't any straightforward support for calling or exposing REST services with JSON payloads. REST support was released with version 12c (12.1.3 to be specific). With this version, a REST adapter was introduced, which can be used for calling REST services or exposing OSB or BPEL as a REST service. Embedded JavaScript inside BPEL was another new feature to help work with REST/JSON services. It was all good, but using them is not very straightforward. There's no proper documentation or tutorial for embedding JavaScript.

We have been using this solution for about seven years now. We started with version 11.1.1.4.

A new deployment or proper deployment takes a lot of time, planning and researching. Once you get your topology right, then scaling the infrastructure is not a big issue. Again, the documentation needs to be more specific about the things you need to keep in mind when starting with a new deployment.

I would rate it no more than 2.5/5. This is where they need to really improve the turnaround time. Issues usually take a bit of time to resolve. It's not an ideal scenario if you have a production issue.

We have used some parts of TIBCO BusinessWorks before. We did evaluate some other products and looked at Gartner, etc. Based on our experience and customer relations with Oracle, we decided to go with it.

Initial setup in the previous version was quite complex. It has improved a lot in the 12c version. Still, you need to configure quite a few things before you get it right. Some of the things are not easy to configure. Also, there are number of places where configuration is required and that makes it a bit tricky.

I will skip ROI. About pricing, if you have a good relationship with Oracle, it helps.

We are happy with the product. If someone is looking to implement it, they should really look to get their infrastructure right before you start implementing services.

We utilize SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) as a service tool to integrate between Oracle and the websites. Primarily as a service integration tool to communicate from many sources into our ERP system. Oracle SOA suite is the middle-ware (middleman) responsible to import all the orders into the Oracle system of records. Additionally we use SOA's B2B suit to integrate to our B2B partners.

I see it as a platform rather than an oracle traditional product.

It's a very critical tool for us. It not only helps us import the orders from our eCommerce platform, but it also helps us to integrate to other third-party products. Those third-party products could be home grown, or other B2C sites or business-to-business sites.

It also helps us keep up with the speed. Whenever we need a quick integration, it's a great tool to call services(any source/destination) and get the integration done on-time. We are less worried about integrating to any third party software because SOA being part of our footprint.

I would like to see better mobile-friendly services. Desktop use is diminishing and customers have moved to smart phones and other Mobil devices . SOA has some mobile services already, but they're not very user-friendly (may be also depending on what version of SOA you are using). We would like to see a focus on mobile-friendly web services moving forward.

The second important aspect I would like to get improved is the User Interfaces. Especially for troubleshooting purposes, I do see a room to improve how a support executive can figure out an issue. In the current world a lot of troubleshoot happens by viewing a payload , which is not the best way to figure out a problem. A better UI can help to minimize the troubleshoot time.

By and large it is a stable product in my experience. There are down sides as well, however. I think handling very high load, the product has to develop some more maturity. For example, the stability becomes problematic when we are processing millions of records at the same time. Putting up more infrastructure can always help.

Scalability and Stability are linked to each other as they impact each other.

It is scalable. You have to spend a little more money to scale it up. Our system handles transactions and products both. If we segregate and have parallel systems(servers) for transactions v/s products, it can be a better performing system.

(5/10)Oracle does not offer support that meets our expectations. We need in-house expertise so that can we manage. You cannot rely on Oracle support. It's an Oracle product at the end of the day, but I don't think the support is up to the mark.There are less knowledgeable people on SOA compared to the other Oracle propriety products.

It all depends on the business model of the company selecting a solution. It's not a complex tool in terms of building/utilizing services. It is a comprehensive service mediation tool and can handle heterogeneous service integrations . Businesses can utilize it as key performance tool as well. SOA allows enterprises to use BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), a run time business matrix from the various applications to provide important insight into the health of its operations and business activities.

Depending on how an enterprise explores it and leverages it, there are lot of benefits that can be reaped out of this comprehensive tool.

Recommendations:

I would recommend that people have some in-house expertise to handle this product. People who really want to use this solution need to know the product well before they use it.

Single development and multiple deployments are very valuable features of this product.

Cost-wise it is a very economical option because I don't have to hire separate iOS developers and Android developers. All I need is to select one developer and once it's developed, I can just deploy it into iOS, Android, Windows and so on. Thus, in this way, it severely reduces my costs.

It needs improvement in terms of Windows support. Actually, it's there but is not that good. So, I need something on Windows support.

Right now, the availability of quicker releases is delayed. In the mobile world, you need it right now; you can't afford to wait. I don't want to wait for six months to get it. If I have faster features availability, that would be great.

Initially, during our first time, we had some problems. Now, we are good.

It scales well to our needs.

We did check out other tools in the market namely Xamarin but we are comfortable with this one.

You should go for it. It is quite user-friendly and the tutorials are hands-on. You just go through the tutorials.

The most valuable feature is its capability to integrate with a wide variety of other solutions.

We have been able to automate a lot of manual processes for our invoicing.

I’d like to see more integration with Salesforce. That's one thing that I think they're still in the inception phase. I think a more robust solution for Salesforce would be good.

It’s pretty robust and stable.

One of the reasons why we went to Oracle SOA Suite is its ability to scale out to all the different platforms and technologies. I think it's doing pretty well. We have integrated with a couple vendors right now, and we plan to integrate another five or six in the pipeline.

Technical support has been pretty good. The Oracle support team has seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about the SOA Suite. They have provided proper support every time we've called.

We were not previously using any other solution. We evaluated this and a couple of other things, and when we did all the metrics and everything else, SOA Suite came out on top.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward, but we had one of the Platinum Partners come in and actually install it. They knew how to do it and there was pretty minimal involvement from us.

We thought about building a custom solution and also looked at Microsoft. We decided to go with Oracle SOA Suite just because it was already pre-built and it was mature enough that it had all the capabilities we were looking for.

When I’m looking for a vendor such as Oracle to work with, I evaluate product maturity and support highly.

Look at all the integration adapters that SOA Suite offers. If those are the integration points that you wish to integrate with, I think it's the right solution. If there are some that are still in development or whatever, such as the Salesforce one, then you should probably consider something else.

There's a little bit of room for improvement, as I’ve mentioned, on the Salesforce side. Other than that, I think it's doing what it's supposed to do.

I think adapting different protocols easily with no coding is the best feature of the middleware SOA Suite.

We have created an offering for our customers, leveraging industry standards in order to utilize the delivery for that.

It should provide better log management and an easier tool for configuration.

There are still some problems that are not covered. The login mechanism still creates issues when it is not configured properly. The monitoring in general is complex. I think that there are some integrations with the cloud and mobile that need to be taken care of.

I have found version 12c to be stable.

The organization by logical domains based on WebLogic is definitely a key factor for the scalability of the solutions.

Technical support is quite a stable process but sometimes there are not responsive, especially for the more urgent and critical cases. In that case, we usually escalate it with our partner.

I'm a system integrator, not a customer. We usually use it in order to provide middleware solutions to our customers. Basically, also based on analyst reports, SOA Suite is at the edge of the technology, so we invested in it.

Initial setup was really complex.

We also have looked at TIBCO, which is very strong as well, and WebSphere, but I think that is a niche player, especially in financials. At the moment, I think TIBCO is the most realistic competitor for Oracle, apart from all of the open-source solutions.

When I’m looking at a vendor such as Oracle to work with, the most important criteria are scalability, reliability, maturity and also support.

Ask for Accenture support. We have tons of experience at the moment in the team and in the regions, in Europe, especially. I think that the best solutions start with the configuration, in terms of high availability that is similar to production, in order to test all the configurations sent in from development.

During the last five years, the product has improved a lot. At the moment, it's a very natural product; a lot of very good features at the high end of the market.

I guess connecting to any and every application. Different sources: it can be a file source, a database, a web service. It's a single source for integration.

I think it has already improved quite a bit. At the system level, when you are running a website, it should be easier to diagnose the source of problems, for example, why the CPU is high, and make the error logs and log files easier to work with to find why an issue happens. Sometimes the Java can be a bit tricky to diagnose the actual problem. I think probably this area can be improved.

I started in 2010, so for over six years now.

It's stable enough. It has its problems as with any other Java application. Java, you know, sometimes can go down; JVM crashes; it has stuck threads. So as with any Java applications, it has its fair share of minor issues; but it's getting better.

It is scalable.

The technical support was average. It's a complex product, so it really takes time before you can find someone who knows, or someone who can get the right answer that we are looking for, and sometimes you don't, even if it takes ages.

If you know it, it's straight forward. If you don't know it, it's rather complex and can be very tricky. If you haven't invested time, you will make mistakes. Then it is not very simple to get back and start again.

If you want to invest in this product, I recommend to go ahead and do it. If someone is starting ,start with the latest version. It version is a lot better than it used to be. Don't even look back at the old version.

The following features of this product are the most valuable to me:

Integration to underlying applications and technologies via its OOTB adapters
Scalability of deployed solutions
Business Process Management (BPM)
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

For my most recent customer, we automated an accounts payable process that integrated four different ERPs into an approval process.

Customers experience issues standing up environments. Unless an experienced administrator is involved, having an environment that is clustered and load balanced requires quite a bit of time. There are third-party tools to automate this configuration, but there is nothing currently out of the box to ease difficulty the installation issues customers run into.

I have used this solution for 8+ years.

SOA has been stable through the years, other portions of the suite have had issues when they rolled out. Customer support is very responsive when issues are found and the product is stable.

Scalability is one of the strengths of the product. We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I know others with issues, but our experience has been that they have been outstanding. Escalations are handled timely and the expertise of the support techs we've been assigned has been outstanding.

I did not previously use a different solution. We works exclusively with Oracle SOA Suite.

This is a complex environment so unless an experienced administrator is involved, having an environment that is clustered and load balanced requires quite a bit of time. There are third-party tools to automate this configuration, but there is nothing currently out of the box to ease difficulty the installation issues customers run into.

The vendor team was not used. Full disclosure - I work for a consulting company and we were brought in to facilitate the BPM and integration aspects of the project.

Get training up front. Hire an experienced administrator. Bring in experienced consultants to help on the initial project to help mentor and provide best practices.

It encompasses a lot of different apps. The key is that it combines a lot of commonly used apps, from a business perspective, for example, business logic implementation such as people or reporting. They made it lot easier. From a development perspective, the tools are pretty good.

My one big improvement would be to make the ID tool that the developers use to develop a lot of these applications better. It could be more stable and the performance can be improved. As a developer, me and my team face the most challenges installing it. It's very memory intensive and it crashes a lot. They could definitely improve on that.

I have been using it for 8-9 years.

Parts of it are stable. When they release a new version, it can be unstable. A lot of times we have seen that, even though they claim in the documentation to have implemented or enhanced certain things, when you start actually implementing it, you realize it's not really been done. For each major release – for example, from 10 to 11 or 11 to 12 – there can be some performance and stability issues in the initial phase. But, overall the patches and the releases are pretty stable.

It’s scalable. It will meet the company's needs moving forward.

Technical support is okay. I would think they could do better. They have a way of raising service requests with Oracle. Every time you raise one, you lose a lot of time when they go through their standard routine before you actually reach a person who knows stuff and you can actually start moving forward. I believe you lose a lot of time just getting to the right person and start going forward. They could work on that for sure. I’m thinking it’s an Oracle specialty.

The initial setup is pretty good, actually, and it's very well documented.

It's a good product, but still also mind your business needs and your business case. I don’t suggest jumping for it right away. Evaluate how much value it can add for your organization.

We use it as middleware to interface between our financial application, which is JD Edwards, and the database, as well as to legacy systems. It serves a critical functionality of linking the applications together to provide us the data we need.

The error reporting can be improved. When you get an email saying that something has gone wrong or something is not complete, it isn't very intuitive. It has to go to a very technical person to be able to tell you what actually the error is and what you need to know about it.

The company has been using the product for about two years.

I would say it is and is not a stable solution, not because of a fault in the product, but because we have a combination of legacy systems and also modern ERP systems. The challenge has been with information moving between the interfaces. When you send information, it's a black box. You don't get a confirmation that information has come back, so it's asynchronous, whereas our applications are synchronous. The ongoing challenge is knowing whether your data been sent completely and accurately. We've had to work to build very good reporting at least. The biggest challenge is getting useful information to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

So far, it has been a scalable solution. The next few years will be the true test of it, but so far, it has been a scalable solution.

Because it's a transformation project program over several years, we have internal and external support. Resources are from Accenture, the service integrator, working with Oracle Managed Cloud Services and ADM. So far, so good.

I wasn't directly involved in the setup. Nonetheless, I would say it's as straightforward as it can be considering our environment.

I think about process, not solutions. Determine what you really want to do first. Then, once you have clearly determined what you want to do, determine your requirements. Once you have the requirements, then go find the solution that meets those requirements. Rather than thinking of the solution and trying to look backwards; does it fit? Know what you really want and then go find the product. You will rarely find a product that gives you 100%, but you might find one that gives you 80% of what you need, so determine what you can live with and what you can't live without.

When I’m selecting a vendor to work with, I don’t want any bait and switch, in the sense of promise and delivery. The space that we are in, that's the biggest challenge. Sales people always get a bad rep as they offer promises and then when the product is delivered, they say something like, "The product doesn't do that or you need to buy something else to get that." I’m looking for simple clarity on what you're delivering, what it can and cannot do. That upfront clarity and honesty is what I look for the most.

• The EM console
• The WebLogic Server
• The SOA suite
• The BPEL processes.
• I think it's good, as we have done our POC on 12c, and it comes with great features, like all-in-one installation, management from one console, enhanced JVM for great throughput, and memory management.

12c play around reviews

12.1.3== SAP adapter dave so much trouble while configuring it.

Not proper documentation is helpful from Oracle.

After the installation and configuration the classes and jars are not loaded which leads to issues with Fusion SAP connectivity.

Over all the The look and feel of the EM console is ok.

I would recommend to use this version of product with 1.7_81_ version of Java/jre environment.

The rcu is combined inside the soa infra jar installation so that is good thing that I found as I don't have to worry about the RCU to download and install and then configure the SOA_INFRA schema's.

so good this is fair deal of my experience. Happy SOA.!!!!

This product provides a robust and scalable integration solution for our organization’s business needs.

In the current version of SOA Suite 11.1.1.7.8, we are having fewer issues as compared to earlier versions. We have had severe issues being denied, and upon following up with Oracle these have not yet been solved.

I've been using it for the last six years.

Stability is sometimes a challenge.

It’s a very scalable application.

3/5

Oracle being reliable, robust and scalable is always chosen.

Initial setup was full of learning.

We implemented it on our own, although on certain modules the Oracle team had helped us.

It’s a bit costly.

I think the world is moving is towards Cloud solutions and in the same path Oracle has cloud solutions, if you are ready to shell out few extra bucks for your Business’s IT infra and solutions, then Oracle is the one.

The ease of use, service virtualization capabilities, support for integrations with multiple communication protocols and applications, seamless integration with other Oracle products, mobile enablement, and cloud enablement are all features of SOA suite that provide us a lot of value. Also, starting in

Oracle SOA Suite has allowed for more productive development, allowing not only quicker release cycles, but also integration between systems and vendors that was previously done point-to-point.

The monitoring capabilities granted the business transactions more visibility over to the business users and proved useful for tracking KPIs as well as for managing SLA alerts when need be.

An area with some room for improvement is the development tool used (JDeveloper) with regard to stability.

Also, there are three administration consoles available with some overlapping functionality, which should be better segregated.

I have been using Oracle SOA Suite for around six years.

Deployment is very straightforward. The application server (Weblogic) provided mechanisms for remote deployment, which makes it possible to create provisioning scripts, greatly reducing deployment effort and

Overall the platform is stable. We haven't had any issues with instability.

Scaling is a breeze. It's very quick to add extra application servers without even having to make the system unavailable.

6/10 - Some interactions take too much time and end up forcing us to resort to workarounds to avoid impact on project milestones.

I have used a few other integration suites, such as JCAPS (formerly a Sun product) and TIBCO Business Works. SOA Suite is a much more complete solution and quicker evolving to fulfill the market's emerging needs. Oracle is putting a lot of effort in developing this product and bringing out new features and improvements on a regular basis.

There are two kinds of setups possible. The "Quick Start" and the "Regular" one. The first is targeted at individuals trying to get a glance at the product without too much time invested on installation and configuration. It comes with a development environment ready to use (including an integrated application server and a database) and is installed in a few minutes. The "Regular" setup is intended for production use (or other environments) and takes longer due to custom configurations that might be needed, but is well documented.

I have implemented and consulted on several implementation projects using Oracle SOA Suite. My main recommendation is to be trained and willing to learn, because there is so much that can be done with this product and the projects are always looking for long-term usage. Having more knowledge will result in implementing better architectures and problem-free solutions.

The most important for a quick ROI is to license according to your needs over the next one to three years. Don't get more products if there is no plan to use them immediately, or there is no skilled personnel to get value from them. Starting smart with licensing will be a big factor for determining the necessary time to get a ROI.

Try it out and explore the existing features and how they would positively impact your business. Identify the use cases for the several products/components in the suite and see what makes sense for you to license and then build on it.

• 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.

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.

We primarily use SOA Suite for our B2B and EDI. It's the framework for our B2B activities. It provides us with an out-of-box EDI solution that allows us to work and trade with all our partners and other companies across the world.

Granted, we're not on the newest and latest version, but there are some performance and reliability issues with the SOA Suite. We're constantly having issues. We have some scheduled scripts to run and they bounce around SOA Suite weekly, so there's definitely room for improvement there.

It's deployed without issue for us.

We've had issues surrounding our B2B and BAM process. There's quite a few issues, but that's speaking from a developer's standpoint and not a DBA's or Technical Lead's.

We don't have that many functional users using it, so scaling has not been a true issue for us.

We use a third-party hosting solution. A lot of the setup in technical maintenance is all handled through them. I know we've logged several SR's for issues with SOA Suite.

The initial setup was done by our third-party implementer. The main solution we used it for was obviously for EDI. Going forward, it may change.

We used a third-party implementer.

Just make sure you work with your technical team and know what current version is and all the patch notes that tie to that.

• Monitoring
• WebLogic performance
• Open standards.

It enables communication between different systems -- some old, some new -- by using middleware.

• More Maven support
• Improved file-transfer adapter
• Large payloads need to be made easier to use

I've used it for eight years.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no stability issues.

We have had no issues scaling it to our needs.

In our experience, technical support is really bad and needs a lot of work.

The initial setup is complex. There are many things involved and if you don't know it very well, you can damage the installation.

I have always been an independent consultant, and I always say there has to be an in-house responsible person/department for SOA.

I don't have specific information, but in most of my projects there is substantial savings when we implement a good SOA strategy.

In other projects, I evaluated/used Netweaver for SAP integration and it was really difficult to use. I used the IBM SOA Solution also, but it is not mature enough for the real world. Oracle offered by far a better SOA solution.

You need to have a good leader/manager take this project and lay down a good strategy/plan before jumping into implementation.

We use it to build integrations for customers. It has a broad set of tools for handling SOAP and REST integrations to FTP, files, and JMS depending on need.

For customers, we have often made integrations from batch processing to propagating changes in a few seconds. With the integration platform in place, it is easier and quicker to make the integrations they need.

There is always room for improvement, but it has shown a continuous growth in functionality. Nevertheless, the stability when used with JDeveloper needs improvement.

I have been using it for six to seven years.

There have been no issues deploying it.

The product is stable, but we have seen less stability with JDeveloper.

It contains good options for handling scalability. We haven't had issues scaling it as necessary.

Technical support is good and available, but you need to know how Oracle Support works to get the best help.

We had no other solution in place.

Setup of the development environment has become a lot easier, as has the production environment. For the production environment, I would recommend someone who has done this before.

Pricing has been an issue for smaller customers. Fortunately, the cloud will now give more options.

No other options were looked at.

There is an active community -- read blogs and books, and attend conferences, and training, or work side-by-side with someone who knows the product. Also, plan the architecture well.

The most valuable features are BPEL orchestrations, mediations and tight integration with Oracle Service Bus, and adapters.

A very useful feature in SOA Suite 12c has been REST adapters, which have now been upgraded so that there is no explicit need to translate REST and JSON on in/outbound.

Also, BPEL extensions and templates have been very useful.

SOA Suite 12c can significantly simplify the integrations and orchestration, including human workflow. In complex IT environments, it can lead to loosely-coupled architecture and reduce the integration complexity considerably. Also, it can contribute to service reuse.

In my opinion, an important aspect that will probably be covered in future versions is support for micro-services and the ability to scale on PaaS and Docker-like environments.

I have used this product since it was introduced as BPEL Process Manager 10g. For 12c, I was among the beta testers.

We've had no issues with deployment.

SOA Suite 12c has improved stability considerably. In the past, we had encountered some minor stability issues with WSM. However, in 12c this has been greatly improved and we have not noticed major problems in production. Also, JDeveloper has been improved.

12c has improved scalability dramatically and now uses fewer server resources. Also, Enterprise Manager provides better tools to monitor load.

We have always gotten prompt and useful responses from support.

No, however we also have experience with IBM BPM. We, however, prefer Oracle SOA Suite due to better integration and richer functionalities.

Setup is straightforward, particularly for development environments. For production and separate domains, you need to know what you are doing. However, the provided documentation is adequate.

We have evaluated IBM BPM, JBoss jBPM, and Activiti. We have figured out that SOA Suite 12c currently offers the richest functionalities and is the best integrated product.

It is essential to have a good understanding of the features provided, including BPEL, services, adapters, mediations, human workflow and other features. It is also good to get familiar with SOA concepts and patterns. Using this product is the right way to go and following sound development practices brings results quickly. However, using the product in wrong way might not provide all the benefits.

• Easy-to-use development environment/maintenance consoles
• Default connectors for third-party integration
• Out-of-the-box deployment functionality

I can deliver higher quality customer solutions and support them both on the architectural level and the technical/implementation level.

Framework extensibility needs to be worked on.

I've been using it for eight years give or take.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Speed/memory consumption on processing of large (XML) documents did have some issues.

We had no issues scaling it.

7/10

We previously used Mule ESB/WSO2. Most of the time, the customer already has an Oracle background, so the implementation of the Oracle middleware was more of a logical extension.

Most of the time, it's straightforward for the integration patterns, and isn't rocket science.

Compared to open source platforms, Oracle isn't cheap. Companies will need to decide if they prefer open source, use, for example, a paid community support and use a framework which may be less mature, or use Oracle, which means a real mature framework, full support, and stability.

When customers are at the beginning of the process of deciding which middleware platform to use and they aren't bound to, let's say, Oracle, the choice to use, for example Oracle SOA Suite won't be the first one.

The Oracle integration platforms keeps getting expanded with more products. Overall, it's a mature and complete platform, ideal for implementing high-quality business solutions. Oracle has a real wide community which can help with almost any use case. It has an easy-to-use development environment. It's just a complete all-in-one solution.

• Pure play integration (ESB)
• Orchestration (BPEL)
• API Management (Rest Adapters, API manager, etc.)

We're an SI, so I can only comment on behalf of our customers. By implementing SOA, underpinned by Oracle SOA Suite, we have been able to help customers save thousands of dollars by optimizing business processes, shortening software development lifecycles by being more agile and reusing services, and APIs. Our business is able to deliver products to the market quicker and cheaper.

API Management and BPM both need work, but I believe Oracle is already working on this.

We've been using it since its inception, 10.3.x, so that's nine to 10 years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

There were no issues in v11.1.1.7, but in 12c, the very early releases were a bit unstable. However, with Oracle's new release cycles were able to release patches very quickly, and now v12.1.3.x and v12.2.1.x are very stable products.

There were issues scaling, but mainly because the customer didn't set up the product properly, and didn't do capacity planning properly. If the product is setup properly according to the right capacity design, it scales as expected.

7/10

The complexity of setup depends on the set up. For developers and/or development environments, setup is very simple. With SOA Quickstart, it only takes a few minutes to have SOA Suite and full IDE up and running. For production environments, it takes a bit longer. However, there are several ways including products that will automate full installation out-of-the-box.

Do proper capacity planning. Engage an expert in the field to assist in defining what the requirement is, what approach to follow when licensing (Oracle processors, named users, metered/unmetered if cloud), and then size to the actual needs throughout time. This approach will almost certainly result in much cheaper license costs, probably less than other competing products that have less flexibility when licensed.

We also looked at Mule ESB/CloudHub, TIBCO, and IBM. There were many reasons that we chose Oracle, including that it's a more robust and scalable product, more features, better future roadmap and product vision, better integration with Oracle Apps, and Oracle Cloud SaaS.

• The technology adapters (Database, REST, LDAP, File, many more), which allow easy integration with technologically diverse systems.
• BPEL and Service Bus, which allow diverse integration patterns to be easily implemented.
• The extensive Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control which provides management and monitoring capabilities.
• The high availability features (mostly important for performance and stability).

Since the SOA Suite provides many components, it is an extensive toolkit for a developer, who can, with relatively little coding, quickly achieve complex functionality.

We implement SOA Suite at different customers. The product helps them achieve their goals in terms of integration requirements (functional and non-functional). This ranges from service-enabling legacy systems to integrating COTS products in a stable, performant, and manageable way. Currently, I work for a customer that is digitalizing a legal processes. At this customer we implement reusable services and processes used by multiple front- and backend applications.

Managing (infrastructure) database growth and performance tuning can be a challenge. The product provides many options for implementing integrations, which is a strength, but sometimes it is also a challenge choosing the best solution.

I used 10g for three years, 11g for six years, and 12c for one year.

We've had no issues with deployment.

I have not encountered many stability issues caused by the product, but sometimes there are issues from poor implementation or maintenance.

Only when the customer did not follow recommendations from the provided Enterprise Deployment Guide were there scalability issues. The new version 12.2.2 is expected to provide multi-tenancy for SOA Suite, which improves this even further.

Technical support is good. I, however, do not often need support; I'm used to fixing things myself as a technical consultant.

I don't have much experience with comparable products. Have seen some things of Mule and TIBCO, but would not be able to provide an unbiased comparison. I think it would also be difficult since the SOA Suite is comprised of many components.

Initial environment setup can be complex (this is different for the SOA Suite Cloud Service where provisioning is largely automated). There are many steps to perform and choices to make. Also, the installation is layered. You require a supported OS, the application server needs to be installed on top, the database needs to be prepared, and the SOA Suite must be installed in the application server. There are other components like load balancers, HTTP servers, etc. which might need to be configured. High Availability is supported on all layers and multi-tenancy on almost all layers, but you need to think about how you are going to implement this.

Oracle SOA Suite is not the cheapest product suite around, but it has many features by default which you will probably need to create, manage, and maintain yourself when implementing other products (High Availability, monitoring, management, and alerting, for example). For a small company, you might not want to pay for a lot of features you might not use. Be a bit careful when implementing SOA Suite on virtualization platforms when licenses are concerned. Also, named users and unlimited license agreements require thought.

I have not done product comparisons. Also, I’m not in a role to choose a product for an implementation.

Choose the right tool for the job. Think carefully about selecting an implementation partner. Preferably choose one who has a proven track record, a good relationship with the product vendor, and who will help you achieve your goals with this product.

The integration possibilities with other Oracle Fusion middleware products is the most valuable feature of the SOA Suite solution.

I'm a contractor, so my client organizations are the ones who benefit from SOA Suite. With it, it's quite visible the number of both internal and external processes that are more integrated. Another organizational benefit is that less human intervention is required when running the suite of products in SOA.

Although the SOA Suite solutions integrate well with Oracle Fusion middleware products, it lacks similar integration with Enterprise Manager. This is something that, in my experience working with clients, is needed for SOA Suite to be a better product.

Including its predecessors, we've been using SOA Suite since 2004.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There were regular issues with the stability of SOA Suite, but they were fixed with help from Oracle technical support.

There have been no issues scaling it.

8/10

I work exclusively with Oracle software.

Until version 10, the initial setup was cumbersome. Over the years and subsequent upgrades, with 11g setup became easier and, now, setting up with 12c is a walk in the park.

I implement SOA Suite for my clients.

You need to make a good estimate of the licensing costs for the first year.

It's a good suite of products designed to implement an SOA architecture. In this sense, OSB is for us the best product in the suite, providing us a tool to integrate our components with a high level of stability that's easy to use.

Using OSB, we can have now a single point of access for all our systems, including legacy solutions. Using Event Processing, we can manage a high amount of data in real-time, detecting patterns.

Indeed BAM needs improvement. Its level of maturity is far below the rest of the product. In version 12c, it's unusable. It doesn't do what it's suppose to do (collect and show KPIs).

We have been using OSB for three years, BPEL and other products for only one year.

There have been no issues deploying it.

We had issues with BAM. We couldn't get it to work. Right now, we are looking for other solutions, as it's clear for us that in 12c BAM is not usable at all.

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

As with other big software companies, if you don't escalate and put pressure, you are not attended to in time.

It was medium. The initial setup is not very complex, but you need specific skills to do it right.

We implemented it using a third-party team of integrators.

We evaluated Open Source solutions and chose Oracle SOA Suite because it has a lot of products inside and due to the experience of other known companies.

Some products like OSB and BPEL engine can be rated 9/10, but some others like BAM are indeed below 3 or 4/10 due to their immaturity.

My best advice is to be careful with reporting using BAM. If you need real-time reporting, you will have to use other solutions.