Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

We mainly use the solution internally to interface between two applications. 

We also use it for our external customers. They send us data and we transform that data to use in our applications, or we store it in our database for further use.

An important area that can be improved is the product's data monitoring. When we use the solution for interfacing or end-to-end data monitoring, we want to know exactly where the data is going and exactly where it is failing, or where there is an issue.

Our organization has been using this product for 10 years.

It is stable because it's quite an old product from Oracle.

Since we are using the solution on-premises, scalability may be the real challenge. We are moving towards using the cloud or Oracle cloud, so maybe the scalability will be easier if we move to the cloud. This challenge isn't caused by Oracle, it's because it is on-premises. I don't want to blame Oracle for the scalability challenges.

Oracle's technical support is not very good, but it is good.

Neutral

It was not really complex and not really straightforward. It was somewhere in between the two.

We are currently using the DevOps model, so it is deployed through DevOps. Deployment is not taking much time because we are not doing it manually. It is an automated deployment.

Usually regarding Oracle products, deployment takes time because it requires manual effort to go around and deploy the code correctly.

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. 

I am using Oracle SOA Suite to do different web services. For example, web service Type SOAP and REST.

Oracle SOA Suite has been beneficial for my organization because it enables us to consume other services and access databases to transfer data. It also allows us to receive messages from web services and transform them into different formats, such as XML. This helps us to effectively integrate and exchange data between various systems and applications.

The Oracle SOA Suite has many useful features, and different organizations may place different emphases on the importance of each feature. Certain features are particularly important to the organization, such as the ability to access databases and transform messages, as well as the use of proxy services to secure web services with usernames and passwords. These features can be critical for enabling effective integration and data exchange between systems and applications.

Other solutions might be better componets such as Salesforce. 

I have been using Oracle SOA Suite for approximately six years.

The solution is stable.

The initial setup of the solution is easy because I have experience with it.

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.

We use this solution for complex integrations between disparate systems that can be done securely, as light-weight services, automation, recovery, robust ETL options, and a lot more.

Comparing with other integration products, Oracle SOA Suite, being offered by Oracle Corporation, brings along a lot of benefits like Cloud and Database features that are an integral part of their offering.

This solution is specifically suitable for applications or systems that would not provide any option to share data or integrate with each other. Having data from applications like a parking system imported into the financial system reduces the revenue processing cycle by ninety percent, with the added benefits of automation, security, and reliability.

Oracle SOA Suite has been in use for more than a decade at our organization and has provided a lot of benefits across the departments.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the option to design, and the development can happen at the same time. Also, it can be done by business users as Oracle SOA Suite allows designing the logical flows that get translated into the actual implementation for the integration.

We have automated incident reporting and closure for critical applications, which is a function that has been very valuable. 

With respect to the feature that allows each process to be accessible and reviewed at a later time, it is a great debug option, but we did notice the database size getting larger by the day. Is there any option available that will allow the process history to be moved to a different schema? If so, it would not affect the performance.

If the disk space expansion can be made more flexible, not requiring a database restart, it would be a major benefit.

We have evaluated MuleSoft and other ETL products. We found Oracle SOA Suite to be the most suitable for our needs, with Cloud features and Database compatibility.

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.

The Service Bus is a solid tool with native throttling out of the box capabilities. Using this feature one can ensure that at any point an application getting "rogue" will not overrun the capabilities of the main back end and by doing so endanger the entire IT landscape of the organization. With careful planning and performance benchmarking, you can ensure the applications are used at full capacity and not pass the critical load point. Another good feature was the introduction of the Composite Application Architecture which I believe it simplifies the entire development lifecycle.

This application impacts upon the overall architecture and directly influences directly the governance within the organisation. From my experience, having a middleware solution implemented, allows the organisation to organically move into a more disciplined development style where the application data ownership is far better respected than before.

I would like to have a cloud version available with virtualization capabilities which will reduce the implementation turnaround time.

I've been using it for seven years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had issues with the early versions but lately the product is performing well.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Oracle is providing good support for this tool.

I have used other middleware applications before and I also evaluated a few. The recommendation for using one tool versus another is usually based on the entire IT landscape, the maturity of the organisation, and the complexity of the entire implementation.

The initial implementation has improved a lot with the latest version. It used to be a more complex activity in the past, while with the latest version the installation is smooth and more straightforward.

I have been on both sides of the fence. It is important to leverage the experience of an implementer who can bring the know-how and protect the organization from making mistakes that can prove to be very costly in the future. If the budget allows try to learn from the mistakes which were done by others before you.

Done right you can see an impact pretty fast. It is always a good idea to package it with other Oracle products in order to take advantage from the discounted rates. Your Oracle Sales Manager should be able to advice what is the best way to have the maximum savings.

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.

The product provides transparency in finances.

The product is not user-friendly. It is very complicated. It is very hard to get the reports.

I have been using the solution for one year.

I rate the tool’s stability a four out of ten. The stability could be improved.

The solution is moderately scalable. However, it is not effective. The solution must improve the scalability. Around 20 to 25 people use the solution in our organization.

The initial setup was complex. It was more of a brownfield. The deployment took one year.

We need technical support for the deployment. We needed three developers and two engineers to deploy the tool.

The ROI was okay. Our customers have not dealt with other competitors’ products. Hence, they are okay with the solution.

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

Our primary use case for the solution is an enterprise integration solution. However, it depends on the business needs. For example, in the telecom domain, it involves connecting multiple systems, sending the data from one system to another, getting the data, and synchronizing it between various systems. Currently, we use the solution to implement integrations. For example, if we need to connect an HCM SaaS solution to an ADP application, PeopleSoft, or Salesforce application, we use the tool for the integrations.

The stability of the solution is the most valuable feature for us because when we initially started working with the solution, it was not stable. However, when Oracle acquired this product in 10G and moved it to 11C, we used to create a lot of Oracle support tickets. But as the product has matured, we're confident that we are getting a good integration solution. Currently, the solution is stable, and we hardly see any issues with it, and the issues we do see are easy for us to resolve without support.

The solution can be improved by creating a lightweight product that can provide persistence features. Additionally, they can include function upgrades in the next release that will offer custom functions like a zip file and encoding.

We have been using the solution for approximately twelve years.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a seven out of ten, and six people currently use the solution in our organization.

The solution is stable. It is very unlikely that you will face any product issues or see any unwanted exceptions. I rate the stability as nine out of ten.

I rate customer service and support a six out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We implemented the solution in-house.

Advice on pricing and licensing will differ from one organization to another and their business needs. I rate the pricing for this solution a seven 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.

• The EM console
• The WebLogic Server
• The SOA suite
• The BPEL processes.
• I think it's good, as we have done our POC on 12c, and it comes with great features, like all-in-one installation, management from one console, enhanced JVM for great throughput, and memory management.

12c play around reviews

12.1.3== SAP adapter dave so much trouble while configuring it.

Not proper documentation is helpful from Oracle.

After the installation and configuration the classes and jars are not loaded which leads to issues with Fusion SAP connectivity.

Over all the The look and feel of the EM console is ok.

I would recommend to use this version of product with 1.7_81_ version of Java/jre environment.

The rcu is combined inside the soa infra jar installation so that is good thing that I found as I don't have to worry about the RCU to download and install and then configure the SOA_INFRA schema's.

so good this is fair deal of my experience. Happy SOA.!!!!

This product provides a robust and scalable integration solution for our organization’s business needs.

In the current version of SOA Suite 11.1.1.7.8, we are having fewer issues as compared to earlier versions. We have had severe issues being denied, and upon following up with Oracle these have not yet been solved.

I've been using it for the last six years.

Stability is sometimes a challenge.

It’s a very scalable application.

3/5

Oracle being reliable, robust and scalable is always chosen.

Initial setup was full of learning.

We implemented it on our own, although on certain modules the Oracle team had helped us.

It’s a bit costly.

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.