Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

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.