Coupa is a purchasing system that connects purchase invoices to our Oracle payables module. You may not know anything about Coupa, but if you have a Coupa adapter connection, you can drag and drop, and then you can simply get the Coupa connection. It will automatically connect to Coupa and pull data from it. 

Because it can easily connect to Oracle natively, it connects to Oracle and pushes data into Oracle. This is one of your use cases. You can also use Concur, which is an expensive product.

Another option is to transfer expense invoices from the Concur system to the Oracle payables model. It's the same thing back and forth; you can even push data from Oracle to Coupa if you need to send an acknowledgment.

There was initially we had two products on-premises, with were BPEL and Oracle Service Bus. When stateless integrations were required, we used Oracle Service Bus, and when a large flow was required, as well as a long-running process, we used BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). Oracle has removed these two distinctions and has merged them into one. Oracle Integration Cloud Service can create two services: one that is simple request and response, and one that can run for an extended period of time which is a good thing. That is extremely valuable. As an organization, you do not have to buy a separate product or two separate products for it.

Furthermore, everything is now under Oracle's control, from an infrastructure standpoint. Initially, when we had an on-premise structure or the on-premise SOA Suite, we had to maintain the logs and server as an organization.

It was entirely the organization's fault if the server crashed. They needed to hire web logic administrators. There was another layer. There was an administrative layer and a development layer. There were a lot of node managers and admin managers. We no longer have to be concerned about infrastructure at all. If the server fails, Oracle will take care of it. We do not need to engage in web logic administration consultations to investigate this. The Oracle is in charge of everything. And if there is any maintenance, Oracle will take care of it as well.

They will provide you with a timeline stating that on this day, we will be performing upgrades or releasing some manuals or updates. Oracle has completely automated this process. You no longer need to be concerned about it. There is no web logic, nothing.

The product provides an easy and low-code integration process. We can quickly build web applications using it.

We implemented this solution in an organization that was able to use OIC without having to procure any hardware. They bought the subscription and implemented quickly. It's the main advantage of the product. 

The product improved our organization due to the available adapters, which are already provided with the product licenses. This helps us integrate with new cloud applications such as CRM, ERP, or any other cloud application. The proprietary adapters are already available, giving us the upper hand to integrate with different applications.

The integration of cloud solutions and realizing Hybrid intergrations with existing on-premises solutions has become far easier (compared to SOA suite).

The movement from ICS to Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) has meant the introduction of additional capabilities which will be of positiver value such as Visual Cloud builder, scaling restrictictions of ICS removed.

It offered a natural transition from, and in some cases, it complements Oracle's existing middleware like SOA Suite (now SOACS), Oracle Service Bus, etc, for many but not all use cases.

Furthermore, it offers a compelling solution within the Oracle environment that makes it easier to integrate Oracle SaaS ERP (via business events, APIs) with any other cloud or in-house product that might support many different interface types. 

Our organization, as a neutral systems integrator with a "client advocacy" approach, also offers solutions built on open-source platforms like Apache Camel. However, the choice of platform depends on customer preferences, suitability, and fit with the rest of their IT environment. Singhpora Consulting aims to deliver good "Software Engineering", i.e. an optimal balance between upfront costs, quality, supportability, maintainability, and runtime performance to customers on tools and platforms best suited to them, rather than promote any one particular product. 

To have a realistic picture of Customers must however keep in mind that the mere fact that it is "cloud" and "iPaaS" does not mean a zero-effort pay-as-you-go solution. There is still quality technical design and skill required in actually producing a good solution to be deployed on it.

Moreover, there is still ongoing effort involved in "Systems Administration". This includes functions like physical or virtual network setup and administration, information security, DB administration, patching, updates, etc. These are not directly "iPaaS" functions but important supporting functions, and the quality of these functions can be critical in every project. Some of these functions are also shared between the cloud provider like Oracle, other vendors, or the customer. 

This is over and above quality and effort involved in the "Application Development" practice, which is what developers and applications architects do. We develop and deploy integration flows that run on the iPaaS platform.

Finally, the most important lesson from decades of Software Engineering should be that every IT system must be independently verifiable by professionals in a given area, such as accounting, supply chain management, or logistics. Automation (and increasingly AI) is valuable as a tool to scale up human effort, verifiability, accountability and explanability are very important properties of good solutions - OIC supports these via a visual flow designer, audit trails/OCI logging, transparency in business rules via the Decision Support System (DSS) component and many more inbuilt features, with adequate features to support more. 

Once customers to keep these expectations clear when making a realistic assessment on skills, budgets, intended outcomes, etc., solutions delivered on OIC can vastly improve efficiency and deliver great value to many enterprises. 

The solution has helped our organization properly frame the integration with different platforms.

Recommendation Engine

More robust adapters and more added adapters

More orchestration capabilities

Improved agent to connect to on premise

The benefits of Oracle Integration Cloud Service is in terms of its cost and pricing for an organization and its integration platform. Integration Cloud comes with a usage based pricing which means the price is based on the number of integrations which are actually used. The biggest benefit is in terms of the price point.

Building integrations between systems is no longer a pure technical discipline. Oracle ICS focuses on the main challenges when doing integrations and that is connectivity to other system as well as the data mapping.

Oracle ICS enables enterprises to start their journey to the Cloud, by providing rich integration functionalities especially in the area of integrating Cloud and On-Premise solutions. So organizations can start small and slightly start shifting their Center of Gravity to the Cloud.

In addition, the cloud marketplace provides new opportunities for enterprises because it furthers the reuse and sharing of knowledge. Due to that the time saved could be invested more valuable in evolving the core business.

Additionally Oracle Partners can also leverage from the Marketplace concept by implementing integrations for common scenarios from which customers can benefit, if the concrete integration scenario exists in their business. A win win situation: new business and participation models for partners as well as rapid time-to-market on the other hand for the enterprises.