Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

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.