WebLogic Suite Reviews

My role is to set up the solution for the application team. They use it to fetch data and I think for the main part they use it for ULT or APL. I'm a database administrator and business analyst and we're a customer of WebLogic. 

I like that the solution is a bit more robust than the API. Also, the setup is straightforward so I rarely have issues in that area or with administering. I think the monitoring tools and the documentation are not bad. 

For improvement, I think the area of clusters are sometimes problematic and we do have issues around that.  

I've been using this solution for two years. 

This is quite a stable solution, we may have had some initial issues but it's fine now. 

I think the scalability is fine. 

The documentation for this solution is very good so I haven't had contact with technical support. 

The initial setup doesn't take much time although it really depends on the quality of the infrastructure. 

This is a straightforward application. It's easy to set up and use if you have the proper documentation, it's not overly challenging. There is a lot of documentation available and what you really need is the technical know how. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for the UI (user interface), as a middleware product that communicates between different servers including application servers and databases.

I think the way the managed servers and the load balancing as well as the threading have been distributed is very good.

The transaction handling of WebLogic and the way it is designed is excellent.

Customization is a bit of an issue for us. 

Support could be better. The expertise when we have some Oracle WebLogic issues and challenges is not there. The issues are not being addressed in time. This really needs to be improved going forward.

I've been using the solution for five years.

We've been using the solution for five years and haven't had any issues with stability so far. There haven't been bugs or glitches. We haven't had crashes.

The solution is scalable. This shouldn't be a problem for organizations that need to expand.

We have about 200 people using the product currently. Mostly they are developers and testing teams.

We've contacted technical support in the past. They've been okay, but they could be better. Sometimes it takes a while to get answers and some individuals don't have a clear knowledge base. I'd rate it seven out of ten in terms of satisfaction levels.

We haven't used a different solution. However, we have a vendor who has created a product which is based on the WebLogic.

The initial setup was not handled by myself. We have a separate team that handles the actual installation of WebLogic. However, I didn't see challenges in the implementation and the team didn't raise any issues that I know of.

I don't remember the exact version number of the solution we are using, but it's around version 12.

I'd suggest other companies shop around. There are other competitors. The cost and the actual purpose of the application should be considered before choosing any solution. 

However, we can recommend this solution considering the stability and scalability that we have seen over the last five years.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We are a company that provides IT products and services. My role is to offer solutions to end-customers and then we implement and deploy it for them. WebLogic is part of the solution that we offer customers because PeopleSoft and Oracle ERP products both use it.

WebLogic runs as the middleware for solutions such as Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle Retail.

WebLogic adds a lot of value to business and investments.

The most valuable feature are robustness, high availability, and multi-domain concepts.

Deployment and integration should be simplified.

I would like to see the licensing policy simplified.

I have been using WebLogic Suite for about 13 years.

The stability of WebLogic is really good. We have customers running billions of dollars in transactions using this solution.

Scalability is excellent. This is a five-billion dollar company and we have 125,000 users. There are many hundreds of concurrent users between ourselves and our customers. We do plan on increasing our usage.

We deal with technical support regularly and we are satisfied with them.

I wouldn't say that the initial setup is very simple, but at the same time, it is not. It needs an external person to do it, so I will say moderately complex, rather than very complex, and it needs an expert.

I would estimate the time for deployment between one and three days.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our team works on it every day but; I don't do the technical work. I'm an operations manager and I  manage the team.

It runs smoothly and everything works fine. 

It integrates well with other solutions.

Sometimes there are issues when we work on a VM because people use it to put all of their reports on it at the same time. Then I have to restart and rebuild the machine. That is more of an issue with the users though. 

I have around 10 years of experience working with this solution.

We have between 40 to 60 users who use this solution.

The setup was complex but there weren't any issues.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

The client is happy and there are some issues sometimes with the scalability but it's probably because of the users. Otherwise, we don't have any other problems. Sometimes there are issues with the reports. 

WebLogic Suite is a solution that I use myself and I also provide services to my customers.

In my company, it is a standalone instance that is not connected to a cluster.

This solution hosts our Oracle Business Intelligence application, OBIEE, and other Oracle applications.

The most valuable feature is that it provides one place where you can control all of the services. You can switch on and off individual services, which comes in very handy.

The restart capability needs to be improved because it takes us 15 minutes to restart any application.

This is a heavy application, like everything that comes from Oracle.

Debugging with this solution is tough and a bit complex.

The interface is not very user-friendly.

I have been using WebLogic Suite for between two and three years.

We have close to 500 users.

We have been in contact with Oracle support, although not for this solution.

In general, Oracle support is good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We only had to deploy this solution once. Since that time, we have switched it off and on every two or three months for maintenance.

We manage one of the instances ourselves, and the other one is outsourced to a third-party in the US.

Oracle is costly compared to the other solutions that we have. It is double the price of a similar solution that we use from Microsoft.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We mainly use this program for forms and reports, as well as application provisioning for Java and so on.

This solution has greatly improved security wise over the last couple of years. The user experience is much better now than it was in the previous version, version 12. And the new inference manager is also much better.

All the areas of this program needs to improve. The integration with other providers and the user management could be better, and the upgrades are pretty complicated. So I would like to see that being improved in the next version.

The program is stable and we haven't had any issues so far.

The program is scalable. You can create domains so we're fine with it. We currently have around 50 internal users and we have customers that which are big, state companies or government companies that use our solutions extensively. 

The first line of support in India is quite bad, but as we go further into the problems, we are referred to some really good technical guys, and they are really great. But it's not immediately opened as a priority one issue of support, so that's pretty bad.

The initial setup was complex at first, but we soon got the hang of it and then it wasn't too bad. To deploy it by hand takes a couple of hours, but provisioning with a custom script takes around 10 minutes. It depends on the environment it will be run in.

My advice to others would be: don't complicate things. Keep it simple. On a scale from one to 10, I rate this solution a seven. I think the support could be much better. So perhaps the developers can work on that. Also, the WebLogic management console could be more intuitive or more up to date, because it's still the old console from version 10. Bring us up to enterprise manager or cloud control, which has been in design and very intuitive.

The solution's ease of use is its most valuable feature.

The solution needs to share more information in terms of training. There needs to be more documentation involved to help those who are completely new to the product.

The solution is stable.

The solution is very scalable. It's easy to add processes even if you are new to the solution.

We haven't had much interaction with technical support, so I can't speak to any direct experience.

We didn't set up the solution ourselves. Rather, we hired our vendor to handle all of the implementation details for us.

A vendor set up the solution on our behalf.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

It's a good product. I'd recommend it to others. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the update deployment feature. Update deployment is when you already have an application deployed and you want to handle a new deployment. The feature ensures you don't need to add or remove anything. Rather, you just need to update and the feature will handle everything else, like adding the new features that have been released on the new deployment. It's very simple.

I had issues when I installed the SSL. With WebLogic, it's a very lengthy process.

The solution isn't 100% stable, but it's pretty good. I'd rate it 3.5 out of five in terms of stability.

Scalability on the solution is great. It's very very easy to scale.

I've never had to reach out to technical support.

The initial setup is very simple. 

If you have everything ready from the OS side, it requires one to two hours to deploy.

The licensing for the solution is pretty expensive. It may be the most expensive solution, if you were to compare it to the competition.

I'd suggest those considering implementing the solution to move to the cloud. It's very simple and easy.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I work with Telcos, one of the cell phone providers in South Africa, and they use it for their billing infrastructure. 

The applications running on the WebLogic suite are for billing and customer CRM, which goes out to the call centers and the dealers. We maintain the environment.

The feature that I have found to be the most valuable is the ease of deployment. 

In the beginning, you do tend to struggle a bit, but once it's deployed, then everything falls into place and maintaining it is quite simple.

It is difficult to say which features can be improved at the moment, as we are not working with the most current version and I am not aware of the features offered in the new version. 

Once we catch up and move on to version 12C, we need to see what can be migrated to the cloud. 

It might not be suitable to migrate the systems to the cloud, or maybe only portions of it. For example, it makes sense for our web services to go on the cloud, but not the actual application, the CRM system.

If we are considering the version that we are currently working with, then I would say that it's all fairly straightforward when it comes to using it. However, there are some small things, such as being able to restart clusters, where you can choose to restart each server one by one instead of all at the same time.  

The ripple start is what we refer to as shutting down and restarting one server at a time in a cluster. In other words, when you kick off a ripple start, and it would go through, it will shut down the one instance, and start it up, then it would move to the next one. It wouldn't shut them all down, and I wouldn't have to manually, stop one, start it up, wait for it to come up and then move down to the next one. This solution would benefit from the inclusion of a ripple start function for clusters.

Also, the cloud integration, which I've heard is very strong with Oracle, it's the shift and lift methodology. 

IBM WebSphere used to do things like that, where you could do a ripple start as opposed to shutting everything down and it would manage each one individually. That would be useful. if it's a live environment we have to ripple start. That's the big one, otherwise, we are pretty happy with everything.

The debugging function is nice on the Weblogic, but one thing WebSphere has, is, that you can apply the debugging permanently, or just until the server is restarted. 

That might also be a feature that would be nice on WebLogic, but not critical because we turned it off afterward.

This solution is very stable.

The only time it's not stable is when the code has a memory leak, or it's heap dumping or the garbage collection isn't fine-tuned. That is not the environment, it's the code. The environment itself is extremely stable.

We have to get caught up as the version we are using is out of support. 

The buzzword right now is cloud, and at some point, we have to see what we can take to the cloud and what we cannot. There are plans to move in that direction.

It is scalable. We have added extra servers and extra instances when it's been required. 

We don't run on VMs, we run on IBM LPARS. We don't run VMs where you can have them firing up, on-demand, but it is scalable for our purposes.

Officially it's not supported, but we do get support when it's required. For example,  approximately six months ago there was that day-zero vulnerability bug that had to be patched. 

The patch that we applied on WebLogic actually broke some environments.

We logged tickets and worked with Oracle and they were able to support us, isolate the issue, and give us new fixes. 

The support was very good and worked very well.

From this experience, I would rate the technical support quite highly. They were able to pinpoint the issue quite rapidly and assist us with a new patch. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Previously, we used the IBM product called WebSphere.

WebSphere and WebLogic are both very similar. They have the same purpose, the same end. I liked the way WebLogic is compartmentalized in the server where you can go and find the configurations, and see it on a file. It's fairly file-based, the data source is everything. 

WebSphere wasn't stored quite that way, so you couldn't work as nicely outside the system. 

There might have been a few other tweaks that WebSphere had which Oracle doesn't. But on the whole, I would say Oracle is far better, it more superior to the IBM product.

The initial setup is complex. We did a migration from WebSphere to WebLogic.

The reason it's complex is it was already running, but it was a very different animal than WebSphere. There were code changes required, which fell to the developers on the development side. On the operational side, things like fine-tuning little things like the data sources work a bit differently, but once you figure one out, then the rest all falls into place.

At the moment the deployment model we use is on-premises, and nothing has been migrated to the cloud. It's a project for the future.

The deployment was approximately just over one year to get it migrated fully to where we were stable enough to turn off the WebSphere.

It was a little bit better than I had expected it to be. We all felt it would be an eighteen-month to a two-year project, and it did come in a little bit less than that. But of course, the business expects it in three to six months. We did try but realized that it was not going to happen unless everything just magically works the first time.

I'm on the operations side, I'm not on the development side. We look after the infrastructure and the upgrading.

The developers are a large team. On the operations team, we have approximately ten people. One person can do a feature release, which is what we call a deployment, in an evening. This is done three times a week.

We do deployments roughly once a week, three times a month. 

We have our own in-house developed deployment manager, which we call the Deployamater, and they set up all the deployments. The manager fetches the EARs, JARs, pages, and JSP files, then it deploys them. 

We don't use the automated deploying via Oracle. We manage it like that, but we do it in an offline environment. 

We duplicate our environments and we go to our offline environment, deploy there, test it first, and then switch the traffic to the new environment that it's being deployed to.

I am a subcontractor to Vodacom, and the company I work for is a vendor, and they are an approved vendor with Oracle.

It is difficult to offer advice because every scenario is different, but I would suggest that you use the available expertise. There is a lot of expertise, don't try to do it all alone.

I wouldn't go back to WebSphere and for me, I would say it is the market leader.

I would recommend this solution and I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

It performs well.

It is connected with our systems, and our systems run on Oracle. It is beneficial because it integrates with our internal systems. This resolves half of our problems for our internal system integration, data retrieval, and subscription to specific events.

A valuable feature is its integration with Oracle Database. We have another system running Oracle Database which can be easily updated from the database and pushed to the middleware. Also, it easily connects to other Oracle products and services.

We need to have more adapters and connectors, especially healthcare system adapters. This solution doesn't have connectors to other external applications. We connect with other vendors' and other companies' systems, therefore we have been asking Oracle for specific interfaces because we have been unable to integrate with these systems using any adapters.

It is stable.

Scaling is costly. 

Technical support is very costly.

We tried to connect our healthcare systems with Oracle, and it needs a lot of support. We would needs to hire a consultant, and the consultant would cost us $4,000 a day. Therefore, it's very costly to integrate with the other systems, which is why we are looking for other alternatives.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

In general, it is a costly solution.

Microsoft.

I rate this solution as a seven out of 10, because it is not fully satisfying our needs. It is good in specific areas, but it's not satisfying all of our requirements. It is not a one stop shop.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• It is affordable.
• Easy to use.
• Ready documentation, training, and examples.