I would definitely recommend Oracle SOA Suite for most customer needs. It is a scalable solution, easy to deploy, and has good uptime. It is a great choice for customers.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Currently, I am working on 11g. I have worked on 12c too. I would highly recommend the product. The product has been evolving for a very long time. The product improved a lot because of the added features and resolved issues. I have seen the 10g version. Now we are in the 12c version. There have been lots of improvements. The product is doing very, very well. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It can be considered one of the best products that you can use for middleware integrations. Compared with other products like IBM, this could be a better product that has connectivity to other applications apart from Microsoft.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. It has much better features compared to other products, especially when we consider other vendors.

I rate this solution a six out of ten. Regarding advice, I would recommend this solution if someone is looking for real-time transactions and B2B.

We use Oracle SOA Suite for application integration in our company. We were using the on-premises version of the product. Since Oracle SOA Suite has its own engine, you can build your integrations, deploy, and use them. We used the Oracle BPEL Process Manager for Orchestration when we had a lot of business logic. Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Oracle VPN come under the Oracle SOA integration platform.

Compared to other solutions like SnapLogic, Oracle SOA Suite is not easy to use. Oracle SOA Suite is suitable for customers with a big complex integration process, where performance and infrastructure stability are more important.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

For integrating with Oracle solutions, such as Oracle EBS, which has an integrated SOA Gateway which can connect to an instance of Oracle SOA Suite to automate various processes, this is the best solution. As it is built on proven robust enterprise grade BEA technology, like WebLogic server, it is perfect for large deployments.

It depends on your needs. If you need to integrate a variety of systems having multiple logics inside your layer of integration Oracle SOA Suite is a good fit. For example, if you have a service that may propose to receive something from one system, but later consumes different information in other systems, and later transfers the data in another way that the other systems have to consume. On a scale of one to ten Oracle SOA Suite ranks a nine out of ten.

My company uses Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), particularly Oracle SOA Suite. My company will replace it with a microservices solution, but not for some time.

I'm using an up-to-date version of Oracle SOA Suite.

Within the company, about two thousand people use the solution. Mainly end users with some admins. Any user of systems integrated via Oracle SOA Suite probably uses the solution as well.

About eight people handle the deployment and maintenance of Oracle SOA Suite, though not dedicated to just this solution or task.

I'd tell anyone looking into Oracle SOA Suite that, technically, it's a pretty good solution and has knowledgeable support. It's just its cost that needs improvement, so it would be wise to look at alternatives. Oracle SOA Suite is also pretty old technology if you compare it with other solutions, so my company is trying to move to a different kind of architecture, the microservices.

My rating for Oracle SOA Suite is seven out of ten.

Over one thousand people in my organization use this solution, including external customers, IT engineers, and our administration team. This is a middleware product for our organization. I mean that it's one of the critical products for my company, and we use it extensively. We currently use each and every feature of Oracle SOA.

I would rate this product either a six or a seven. If you are going to use this product, I suggest making sure that it is designed well by an architect so you can use it effectively. The effectiveness depends on the architect who is going to introduce and implement this product. 

This is a good solution and you can use it with different web services. You have the flexibility to use other technologies. For example, PHP Web Services and Java Web Services.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Oracle SOA Suite a nine out of ten.

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.

Plan carefully and make sure that the SOA is part of the vision of your enterprise. The last thing you want is to make it an "after thought" which can prove itself to be a risk on its own and very intrusive in nature.

I will not recommend Oracle to others. Overall, I rate the product a three or four out of ten.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten because it is one of the best and most global products available on the market. The product is good, but its function options can be improved.

I think the world is moving is towards Cloud solutions and in the same path Oracle has cloud solutions, if you are ready to shell out few extra bucks for your Business’s IT infra and solutions, then Oracle is the one.

In our enterprise, we have a mix of products and each product helps the business in different ways. It's advisable to measure the business needs first and then plan for the implementation, because once implementation starts with an older version by the time it stabilizes, the stack needs to be upgraded. Oracle product upgrades are not very straightforward. Sometimes there is a slight unwillingness from the stakeholders to stay on the updated version rather than continuing with the existing.

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.

Go for Oracle SOA Suite if you have complex integration scenarios or there is a need to service your legacy systems. Never implement a business functionality in Oracle SOA suite and it has to be purely used for VETRO (Validation, Enrichment, Transformation, Routing, and Orchestration). It is not recommended for start ups to build their IT infrastructure.

This is a good solution and I would recommend it to others.

I rate Oracle SOA Suite a nine out of ten.

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.

This is a good product and I can recommend it to others. That said, there are a lot of new products that are coming onto the market, including open-source solutions. If people are starting from scratch then I would recommend evaluating several of them.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Check also Oracle ICS and PCS on the cloud.

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.

There are different products that can do the same thing. Evaluate your requirements and if you have big plans for integration with Oracle, give it some thought.

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.

As a consultant working on both 11g and 12c , I will strongly recommend customers move to 12c as soon as possible and leverage the huge number of new features the product provides in the 12c version.

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.

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.

Perform a proper requirement gathering and check where this product is best suited in your organization.

I would recommend others to use Oracle SOA Suite, it's a great product. Now that we have the cloud solution, if your other products are in the cloud, then you can implement the cloud-based version. Most of my applications are on-premise, and that is why I am using the on-premise version. I would recommend the solution to anyone who wants stable, scalable, very versatile, and resilient, integration software.

I rate Oracle SOA Suite an eight out of ten.

Collect your requirements and be clear with what you need. Before starting a concrete project or even before doing the final sizing, talk with others who have already implemented the solution or have reliable experience in this area. This will help you to get things right from the beginning and help you to avoid running into pitfalls. Do not undersize the environment and always keep in mind what will come in the future.

The product can be used to build a company's robust foundation regarding a enterprise-wide integration platform without hesitation, which we already did in different project contexts. Because the platform helps to solve complex problems, it is complex itself and so not that easy to understand and to learn. The learning curve is high accordingly.

EDIT: To ensure robustness and easy changeability of the developed services and components, my recommendation is to set up a Continuous Integration (CI) environment as a first step in every project. The CI environment is the central platform for automated test executions as well as for deployment automation and is - from my point of view - absolutely needed to succeed with complex integration implementations.

It is a very good ESB if your team has JEE knowledge.

I would rate it an 8. The reason being, I didn't want to give it a higher rating is because it's a little bit complex. It takes a little bit of time to get used to it, and to figure out and find the actual developers who can work on the solution. Like the processes and stuff. And that's basically why I would rate it a 8.

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 only advice I can give is to just make sure that you are very familiar with the products and the services that they offer. Ensure there is someone involved who is familiar with the product and its features for the implementation of an Enterprise Software solution.

With a lot of cloud applications coming in, the dimensions of integration is changing. Integration is not just between systems on premise, but it is also between systems on-premise and in the cloud. And, again between systems within the cloud. So WebLogic, and SOA Suite together are not sufficient to handle all these integrations. It has been proven to support integration which are on-premise to cloud, and then cloud-to-cloud integration, so the dimensions of integration are changing. Invest in how you would use SOA Suite over other cloud-based integration suites such as ICS and have a clear strategy about when do you use which integration platform.

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.

My advice for people looking to implement this product is that training is a must.
You have to make that investment in your in-house resources to be successful in supporting the product. If they fix the memory leak issues with JDeveloper toolset and make the training needed less intensive I would give it a 10/10.

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.

You should use the new MFT, templates, REST features, and cloud adapters to get the best out of it.

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.

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.

Just make sure you work with your technical team and know what current version is and all the patch notes that tie to that.

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.

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.

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.

You have to have patience and struggle with it, as with all technologies!

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.

My advice is to buy it and use it. It's a great product.

No.

Try it out and explore the existing features and how they would positively impact your business. Identify the use cases for the several products/components in the suite and see what makes sense for you to license and then build on it.

You need to have a good leader/manager take this project and lay down a good strategy/plan before jumping into implementation.

I'll advise potential customers, especially large enterprises, to go for this product.

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.

You should go for it. It is quite user-friendly and the tutorials are hands-on. You just go through the tutorials.