On a scale of 1 to 10, I rate Oracle SOA Suite an 8 out of 10. My advice to organizations considering Oracle SOA Suite is to ensure they have a strong infrastructure support team capable of managing applications and servers, which is critical.
We use Oracle SOA Suite for application integration in our company. We were using the on-premises version of the product. Since Oracle SOA Suite has its own engine, you can build your integrations, deploy, and use them. We used the Oracle BPEL Process Manager for Orchestration when we had a lot of business logic. Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Oracle VPN come under the Oracle SOA integration platform. Compared to other solutions like SnapLogic, Oracle SOA Suite is not easy to use. Oracle SOA Suite is suitable for customers with a big complex integration process, where performance and infrastructure stability are more important. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
If you have a limited budget and you want to use Oracle SOA Suite, and your company does not have an agreement with Oracle forget it.
Budget aside, Oracle SOA suite price fit enterprise and large departmental projects. Some knowledge on Oracle DB and Weblogic is especially required if you deploy your application in production. At the development time, a VM or a container is convenient to start developing, but at the Runtime on production, advanced knowledge is mandatory. So, if you need to connect a file system to a database, Oracle is over-powered for your case, and a simple Camel application is enough to do it.
Suppose you plan to create workflows of services AàBàCàD (vs implementing service orchestrations) you can use Oracle SOA Suite, especially if you already have an Oracle License that covers the cost of the tools. Nevertheless, I think that Oracle SOA Suite designer focused on service-orchestration more than workflows and consequently tools such as WSO2, Dell Boomi or Mule would be more efficient.
Oracle’s tool is performant when complex business processes must be implemented, and sophisticated service composition is required. Reliable and efficient, the SOA suite allows you to develop robust service-based integration platforms. In this area, Oracle competes with Tibco, WebMethods, Biztalk and OpenESB.
So, regarding the technologies used in your company, you could prefer Biztalk, Tibco, WebMethods or OpenESB to Oracle. As explained in one previous review, Oracle and OpenESB have been designed by the same team (Sun->Oracle), and there are fewer differences between both products than with the others. If your company is not linked to a technology (ex: Biztalk, C#, Windows) and the price is a decisive criterion, try to add Oracle SOA suite in your Oracle licenses, or link Webmethods within your agreement with Software AG, it will be cheaper for your budget. Else, you can try OpenESB, which is less expensive than the products in this category.
To summarise:
Do not hesitate to use Oracle SOA suite if you are an Oracle customer who wants to implement complex business processes in a service-based architecture project. Else consider the type of application (Workflow vs Orchestration) and the price of the product, the learning curve and the skill available in your production team.
Director of Tech and Consulting Services at Oriontax
Reseller
Sep 28, 2023
I would definitely recommend Oracle SOA Suite for most customer needs. It is a scalable solution, easy to deploy, and has good uptime. It is a great choice for customers. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Currently, I am working on 11g. I have worked on 12c too. I would highly recommend the product. The product has been evolving for a very long time. The product improved a lot because of the added features and resolved issues. I have seen the 10g version. Now we are in the 12c version. There have been lots of improvements. The product is doing very, very well. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
It depends on your needs. If you need to integrate a variety of systems having multiple logics inside your layer of integration Oracle SOA Suite is a good fit. For example, if you have a service that may propose to receive something from one system, but later consumes different information in other systems, and later transfers the data in another way that the other systems have to consume. On a scale of one to ten Oracle SOA Suite ranks a nine out of ten.
IT Systems Director at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Dec 1, 2022
My company uses Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), particularly Oracle SOA Suite. My company will replace it with a microservices solution, but not for some time. I'm using an up-to-date version of Oracle SOA Suite. Within the company, about two thousand people use the solution. Mainly end users with some admins. Any user of systems integrated via Oracle SOA Suite probably uses the solution as well. About eight people handle the deployment and maintenance of Oracle SOA Suite, though not dedicated to just this solution or task. I'd tell anyone looking into Oracle SOA Suite that, technically, it's a pretty good solution and has knowledgeable support. It's just its cost that needs improvement, so it would be wise to look at alternatives. Oracle SOA Suite is also pretty old technology if you compare it with other solutions, so my company is trying to move to a different kind of architecture, the microservices. My rating for Oracle SOA Suite is seven out of ten.
Over one thousand people in my organization use this solution, including external customers, IT engineers, and our administration team. This is a middleware product for our organization. I mean that it's one of the critical products for my company, and we use it extensively. We currently use each and every feature of Oracle SOA. I would rate this product either a six or a seven. If you are going to use this product, I suggest making sure that it is designed well by an architect so you can use it effectively. The effectiveness depends on the architect who is going to introduce and implement this product.
Oracle Training Consultant at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Consultant
Dec 27, 2021
I would recommend others to use Oracle SOA Suite, it's a great product. Now that we have the cloud solution, if your other products are in the cloud, then you can implement the cloud-based version. Most of my applications are on-premise, and that is why I am using the on-premise version. I would recommend the solution to anyone who wants stable, scalable, very versatile, and resilient, integration software. I rate Oracle SOA Suite an eight out of ten.
Application Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Dec 1, 2020
This is a good product and I can recommend it to others. That said, there are a lot of new products that are coming onto the market, including open-source solutions. If people are starting from scratch then I would recommend evaluating several of them. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
For integrating with Oracle solutions, such as Oracle EBS, which has an integrated SOA Gateway which can connect to an instance of Oracle SOA Suite to automate various processes, this is the best solution. As it is built on proven robust enterprise grade BEA technology, like WebLogic server, it is perfect for large deployments.
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
MSP
Mar 31, 2016
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.
Oracle SOA Suite is a comprehensive, standards-based software suite to build, deploy
and manage integration following the concepts of service-oriented architecture (SOA).
The components of the suite benefit from consistent tooling, a single deployment and
management model, end-to-end security and unified metadata management.
Oracle SOA Suite helps businesses lower costs by allowing maximum re-use of existing
IT investments and assets, regardless of the environment (OS, application server,...
On a scale of 1 to 10, I rate Oracle SOA Suite an 8 out of 10. My advice to organizations considering Oracle SOA Suite is to ensure they have a strong infrastructure support team capable of managing applications and servers, which is critical.
We use Oracle SOA Suite for application integration in our company. We were using the on-premises version of the product. Since Oracle SOA Suite has its own engine, you can build your integrations, deploy, and use them. We used the Oracle BPEL Process Manager for Orchestration when we had a lot of business logic. Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Oracle VPN come under the Oracle SOA integration platform. Compared to other solutions like SnapLogic, Oracle SOA Suite is not easy to use. Oracle SOA Suite is suitable for customers with a big complex integration process, where performance and infrastructure stability are more important. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
If you have a limited budget and you want to use Oracle SOA Suite, and your company does not have an agreement with Oracle forget it.
Budget aside, Oracle SOA suite price fit enterprise and large departmental projects. Some knowledge on Oracle DB and Weblogic is especially required if you deploy your application in production. At the development time, a VM or a container is convenient to start developing, but at the Runtime on production, advanced knowledge is mandatory. So, if you need to connect a file system to a database, Oracle is over-powered for your case, and a simple Camel application is enough to do it.
Suppose you plan to create workflows of services AàBàCàD (vs implementing service orchestrations) you can use Oracle SOA Suite, especially if you already have an Oracle License that covers the cost of the tools. Nevertheless, I think that Oracle SOA Suite designer focused on service-orchestration more than workflows and consequently tools such as WSO2, Dell Boomi or Mule would be more efficient.
Oracle’s tool is performant when complex business processes must be implemented, and sophisticated service composition is required. Reliable and efficient, the SOA suite allows you to develop robust service-based integration platforms. In this area, Oracle competes with Tibco, WebMethods, Biztalk and OpenESB.
So, regarding the technologies used in your company, you could prefer Biztalk, Tibco, WebMethods or OpenESB to Oracle. As explained in one previous review, Oracle and OpenESB have been designed by the same team (Sun->Oracle), and there are fewer differences between both products than with the others. If your company is not linked to a technology (ex: Biztalk, C#, Windows) and the price is a decisive criterion, try to add Oracle SOA suite in your Oracle licenses, or link Webmethods within your agreement with Software AG, it will be cheaper for your budget. Else, you can try OpenESB, which is less expensive than the products in this category.
To summarise:
Do not hesitate to use Oracle SOA suite if you are an Oracle customer who wants to implement complex business processes in a service-based architecture project. Else consider the type of application (Workflow vs Orchestration) and the price of the product, the learning curve and the skill available in your production team.
I hope it is useful for you.
Thank you for your feedback
Paul
@Paul Perez thanks for providing such in-depth advice for other users!
I would definitely recommend Oracle SOA Suite for most customer needs. It is a scalable solution, easy to deploy, and has good uptime. It is a great choice for customers. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.
I will not recommend Oracle to others. Overall, I rate the product a three or four out of ten.
Currently, I am working on 11g. I have worked on 12c too. I would highly recommend the product. The product has been evolving for a very long time. The product improved a lot because of the added features and resolved issues. I have seen the 10g version. Now we are in the 12c version. There have been lots of improvements. The product is doing very, very well. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
This is a good solution and I would recommend it to others. I rate Oracle SOA Suite a nine out of ten.
It depends on your needs. If you need to integrate a variety of systems having multiple logics inside your layer of integration Oracle SOA Suite is a good fit. For example, if you have a service that may propose to receive something from one system, but later consumes different information in other systems, and later transfers the data in another way that the other systems have to consume. On a scale of one to ten Oracle SOA Suite ranks a nine out of ten.
My company uses Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), particularly Oracle SOA Suite. My company will replace it with a microservices solution, but not for some time. I'm using an up-to-date version of Oracle SOA Suite. Within the company, about two thousand people use the solution. Mainly end users with some admins. Any user of systems integrated via Oracle SOA Suite probably uses the solution as well. About eight people handle the deployment and maintenance of Oracle SOA Suite, though not dedicated to just this solution or task. I'd tell anyone looking into Oracle SOA Suite that, technically, it's a pretty good solution and has knowledgeable support. It's just its cost that needs improvement, so it would be wise to look at alternatives. Oracle SOA Suite is also pretty old technology if you compare it with other solutions, so my company is trying to move to a different kind of architecture, the microservices. My rating for Oracle SOA Suite is seven out of ten.
I rate this solution a six out of ten. Regarding advice, I would recommend this solution if someone is looking for real-time transactions and B2B.
Over one thousand people in my organization use this solution, including external customers, IT engineers, and our administration team. This is a middleware product for our organization. I mean that it's one of the critical products for my company, and we use it extensively. We currently use each and every feature of Oracle SOA. I would rate this product either a six or a seven. If you are going to use this product, I suggest making sure that it is designed well by an architect so you can use it effectively. The effectiveness depends on the architect who is going to introduce and implement this product.
I would recommend others to use Oracle SOA Suite, it's a great product. Now that we have the cloud solution, if your other products are in the cloud, then you can implement the cloud-based version. Most of my applications are on-premise, and that is why I am using the on-premise version. I would recommend the solution to anyone who wants stable, scalable, very versatile, and resilient, integration software. I rate Oracle SOA Suite an eight out of ten.
This is a good product and I can recommend it to others. That said, there are a lot of new products that are coming onto the market, including open-source solutions. If people are starting from scratch then I would recommend evaluating several of them. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Check also Oracle ICS and PCS on the cloud.
For integrating with Oracle solutions, such as Oracle EBS, which has an integrated SOA Gateway which can connect to an instance of Oracle SOA Suite to automate various processes, this is the best solution. As it is built on proven robust enterprise grade BEA technology, like WebLogic server, it is perfect for large deployments.
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.