Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

We are using Oracle SOA Suite for integration for both our internal and external systems. For the internal systems, we use a gateway to connect to it, and for the third party connections. We use Oracle SOA Suite for orchestration, transformation, and translation.

In Oracle SOA Suite some applications are not able to use REST, but it can support both SOAP and REST. You're able to integrate quite a lot of systems, which may not be able to in other solutions. You can also use XML and JSON. It is a standardizing type of tool. It doesn't matter whether I'm using JSON or XML, it can convert them.

After starting to use this solution your time to take products to production becomes a bit faster. I've learned to embrace new technologies and to take the opportunity to learn and make use of the new technologies that are there. For example, if you can reuse an API or a service, then it saves you a lot of development time and makes the teams deliver much faster.

Overall the solution is quite versatile.

The resiliency of this application can have problems with a downstream system., sometimes it's unable to recover quickly. You have to restart the services. However, this is most likely because I'm using an old version, which is 12.1.3, but if I upgrade to 12.2, then that will problem will be resolved. I'm in the process of thinking of upgrading it.

I have been using Oracle SOA Suite for approximately seven years.

Oracle SOA Suite is stable as long as you do the correct installation, with the architecture. It's good and very stable. I have quite a lot of services that run using it.

The solution is highly scalable because I'm using three nodes, three physical nodes, or virtual machines, and if I want to add a fourth one, I can add it very easily. You can add more nodes and more managed servers. We call them managed servers, without any downtime. We have more than one node, and maintenance becomes very easy. If your architecture is done well everything will work perfectly. For example, installing the solution on at least two nodes for higher availability is scalable.

We have approximately 300 services running and the number of users can vary. The user count can vary because different applications can call the same service, we reuse these services. For example, at any one time, we could have approximately 50,000 messages passing through in about 10 minutes every ten minutes.

The technical support is good, we have premier support which costs extra.

We previously have not used another similar solution.

The installation can be straightforward if you follow the right guidance from Oracle. The infrastructure needs to be properly done.

The full implementation took use approximately one year, but it was because we have a  disaster recovery(DR) site also. We had to install it on both sides. We installed it on the DR site, used it, then copied it onto the DC site, the goal was for it to be faster.

We used Oracle consulting services for the implementation, they are very good.

We have at least four infrastructure engineers working on the support of the solution because you need people shadowing each other. Four should be good.

You will need an infrastructure person because it runs on WebLogic. Another person who can set up the infrastructure, and someone else who can work on the Oracle SOA Suite, which involves many services. Your security team needs to get involved too, they are part of this project. However, there are only two main technical people involved, infrastructure and product person.

We have evaluated other options.

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.

There are a good number of integrations built on Oracle SOA Suite. These integrations include order processing, debit card and credit card payments, and integration with Paypal and Paymetric.

The solution's XSLT or XSL Transformation feature was very useful. The solution can deal with large volumes. The solution's CPU and memory usage are better managed. Okay. The solution's error handling and tracking are also better.

The solution’s initial setup is complex and could be improved. A big challenge for Oracle SOA Suite is that you don't get too many technical resources.

We did a migration with Oracle SOA Suite for a few months.

Oracle SOA Suite is a stable solution.

Scalability is a challenge for Oracle SOA Suite.

The solution has good performance, and it won't give you any kind of memory leakage. The solution's usability is a little bit challenging, but its performance and CPU usage for complex integrations are always good.

Oracle SOA Suite is an expensive solution.

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.

I am using Oracle SOA Suite for integration purposes.

The most valuable feature of Oracle SOA Suite is all the platform's capabilities.

The solutions can improve the communication or translations between formats, such as JSON and XML. The JSON REST API could improve.

I have been using Oracle SOA Suite for approximately 10 years.

Oracle SOA Suite is stable.

This solution is scalable if it is designed well.

Three people are using the solution.

The support is decent.

I rate the price of Oracle SOA Suite a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have WSO2 and Microsft Bistock before they stopped production.

This is a good solution and I would recommend it to others.

I rate Oracle SOA Suite a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is an enterprise integration solution. However, it depends on the business needs. For example, in the telecom domain, it involves connecting multiple systems, sending the data from one system to another, getting the data, and synchronizing it between various systems. Currently, we use the solution to implement integrations. For example, if we need to connect an HCM SaaS solution to an ADP application, PeopleSoft, or Salesforce application, we use the tool for the integrations.

The stability of the solution is the most valuable feature for us because when we initially started working with the solution, it was not stable. However, when Oracle acquired this product in 10G and moved it to 11C, we used to create a lot of Oracle support tickets. But as the product has matured, we're confident that we are getting a good integration solution. Currently, the solution is stable, and we hardly see any issues with it, and the issues we do see are easy for us to resolve without support.

The solution can be improved by creating a lightweight product that can provide persistence features. Additionally, they can include function upgrades in the next release that will offer custom functions like a zip file and encoding.

We have been using the solution for approximately twelve years.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a seven out of ten, and six people currently use the solution in our organization.

The solution is stable. It is very unlikely that you will face any product issues or see any unwanted exceptions. I rate the stability as nine out of ten.

I rate customer service and support a six out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We implemented the solution in-house.

Advice on pricing and licensing will differ from one organization to another and their business needs. I rate the pricing for this solution a seven out of ten.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten because it is one of the best and most global products available on the market. The product is good, but its function options can be improved.

We primarily use this product for integrating with Salesforce and SaaS applications that our company uses for quality. We also have other legacy applications, and now, we are integrating the tool with our internal applications. We are also using Oracle B2B, which is part of SOA.

The most valuable features are the dashboard and audit trail

They have a good auditing feature.

It offers end-to-end Java support and JavaScript support. In case there is something that doesn't work out of the box, you have the flexibility to customize it.

There are networking and firewall issues that tend to delay our projects. I believe that is the case with any middleware.

The documentation and details can be a little better, and more user-friendly. They supply lots of documentation but finding what we need is challenging at times.

There is room for improvement in terms of support.

In the next version of this solution, I would like to see improvements made to the test environment for real-time testing. There is a lot of new software that isn't there until you deploy, which means that you cannot test real-time.

We have been using the Oracle SOA Suite for three years.

It has been stable for us, so far.

We do not have many integrations. We have a very small team and we have four or five consultants working for us. Together with a couple of people in our organization, there are six or seven people who have access to manage.

The technical support from Oracle is good, although it can be better.

The initial setup is not very complex.

Our scenario is different. We do not have write access in our production environment, so we have to depend on Oracle Managed Services. Because they have to make the changes, it gets a little bit delayed. If we had the write permissions then it wouldn't be an issue.

Our in-house team deployed it. 

When I began working with this product three years ago, the company already had Oracle EBS and other Oracle software that was already in use. We recently evaluated other products but we thought it was the best option to go with Oracle.

One of the reasons is that there is a lot of code involved, and we would have had to write everything into the new software.

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.

Sysadmin and DBA for our internal SOA Suite solution development and an implementer at various customer sites.

SOA Suite allows legacy applications to be connected to new applications using an intuitive interface. This defines workflows which are triggered based on various criteria and events. This enables our customers to switch from polled events or scheduled actions to triggered micro batches. It enables the freshest data to be available across all the various systems. It also is a building block of many packaged applications from Oracel such as Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracel Banking Platform, Oracel Insurance platform Etc.

The ability to stand up a highly available SOA Suite, which has full DR capabilities, in a remote center and synchronize the databases using Data Guard. From a sysadmin perspective, it is a very robust solution. We see even llomng after Oracel retired AIA which was built on Oracel SOA it is still very popular in the telecom industry.

Various parts of SOA, BPEL, and so on, each have their own consoles which need to be accessed individually with different logins. It would be better from an admin perspective if all the consoles were accessible via a single login.

No, we have not faced any major issues.

No issues. We were able to scale out using multiple application and web servers balanced by hardware load balancers and Weblogic clustering. Similarly, we were able to deploy the database on Oracle real application clusters, allowing scale out of the SOA Dehydration database.

We have had some very good interactions with some support engineers, but felt there were others who were not up to the mark. Hence, sometimes it is useful to reopen unsatisfactorily closed SRSs in a different timezone .

No previous solutions were used.

The initial setup was quite complex. We were interested in an HA DR setup with scale out, including multiple web, app, and DB servers having no single point of failure. Hence, we went with an enterprise deployment which is quite a bit more complex than the standard install.

We implemented it ourselves (as we are system integrators for this solution) both at our own premises and at multiple customer locations.

This is difficult to quantify as it enables additional different functionality which was not there with a vanilla setup. 

It became a necessary part of our successful solution.

This product is WebLogic based, hence it can be both resource hungry as well as expensive from a licensing point of view.

We have a mandate to work with various Oracle products, hence we did not evaluate it against any competing products. However, some of our customers did compare this solution to Mule ESB. 

SOA Suite is the only solution that integrates seamlessly with other Oracle ERP products.

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.

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.