Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

• 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.