Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

• The integration with various products
• Seamless integration

It helped in the transfer of data from one system to another.

The web services need to be more robust. Also, the error handling should be improved.

More than four years.

We had several issues.

Most of the time.

Yes.

A four out of 10.

A four out of 10.

No.

The initial setup was complex without proper documentation.

A vendor team did the installation.

Not applicable.

No.

The features of this product that are most valuable to me are the dashboard creation ability of BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) product. Also the flexibility of using the JDeveloper development tool for web service and Oracle Service Bus development.

One example of how this product has improved my organization functions is in the shortening of the development time to market in delivering custom solutions. Another example is in the technical agility and flexibility to adapt to business process change that happens at a very fast pace in companies daily.

One area for improvement that I would like to see change in the next release is in the JDeveloper toolset. Occasionally, when you have open to many windows the tool acts erratic and has memory leaks.

I have used this solution since 2010-2011 for various companies. Also across different industries I have been successful to develop and implement solutions using this toolset.

One of the main issues is figuring out how to do what you want in the toolset.
The documentation occasionally misses steps. OSB development can get tricky

I have encountered the occasional JDeveloper memory leak.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Oracle customer service is very helpful. The website is full of on demand tutorials and documentation.

The Initial setup of the product is straightforward as long as you do your pre-planning and follow the prerequisites. Also, occasionally you encounter an issue that requires that a ticket be created with support or independent research must be done to resolve the issue (i.e. search the web or read blogs for missing steps.)

I have implemented the solution as a mixed implementation between vendor resources and in house. This model has been used at all my implementations across industries. My advice would be to identify your pre-requisites and also hold pre-planning meetings to identify business and technical requirements.

I have previously investigated other products in the quadrant and I choose to align myself with the Oracle SOA Suite. This is due to the robust features available and the scalability of the product suite.

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.

Conceptually, how it integrates a lot of essential enterprise process components. That's the most valuable.

It consolidates various other software applications into the one solution.

The interface is too complicated. Making modifications still requires too much technical knowledge. The user interface needs to be less technical so that business analysts can utilize or develop their process, design their process more easily, without technical knowledge of how SOA Suite works.

We're using it for a minimum of it's capabilities, so no stability problems. But we have talked to various other people who said that when they deploy more components in SOA Suite, they run into more performance issues and the like. We're afraid to do that, so we're staying with the minimal.

It is very scalable.

We have been happy with the response we get. We have a huge license that we own, so Oracle does try to keep us happy.

We used to use SMT, which then became obsolete, so we changed to SOA Suite.

We had high hopes of deploying SOA architecture, which didn't go anywhere because it's a lot of money and effort, so things are on hold. It is too big of solution for us at this point. 

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.

Oracle SOA 12c comes with many new features mostly for developers to deliver integrations rapidly.

Saving the BPEL. The activities as templates is the most common use case I have used whilst in development. This enables us to adhere to corporate standard for developing integrations. Unlike SOA 11g where we used to copy paste code, SOA12c templates makes it easy for developers.

The Managed File Transfer (MFT) is a great addition to the product set managing all our file transfer capability, encryption, decryption, monitoring, visibility and resubmission of transfer. It integrates with SOA Suite seamlessly.

For Oracle Service Bus, there is no more Eclipse and only a single JDeveloper for all development and EM consoles for monitoring.

REST support for both SOA and OSB greatly enhance the product capability for mobile and cloud integration. Inbuilt continuous integration capability through JDeveloper. It has more adapter support for cloud integration than before.

For one of the customer where an on-premise application needed to be integrated with cloud, the integration is done using SOA Suite, reducing the development time due to the use of templates. Also, MFT handles all kinds of secure file exchange reducing the cost for having and managing multiple FTP servers. The same templates are used for other customers too reducing further our development time and delivering quality product.

For REST support, the product internally converts to a SOAP WSDL format, and I would like to see the product only work to REST standards. It would be nice if we could rename a SOA composite feature and have pre-built templates with best practises implemented.

I've been using it for the last seven years, and 12c for the last 10 months.

We have encountered no issues with its stability.

It’s a scalable application.

I have never used any other product.

For trying out a developer edition, the installation was easy unlike previous versions. The automatic upgrade from 11g to 12c was not painful.

We implemented it on our own.

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

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.

Provides connectivity between discrete systems and has availability. It has more features to connect using connectors and Adapters and also cloud integrations. The re-usability of the services makes it reliable and reduces the development efforts. 

It enables seamless integration and accountability. It has adapters for Salesforce and other cloud adapters. It has the infrastructure to re-process and troubleshoot the failed instances.

Decrease the number of internal resources which the product uses. 

We have been using this solution for ten years.

There were no deployment issues.

In the previous versions, we used to get stability issues. It has improved a lot since then.

There were no scalability issues.

Valuable features include connectors and BAM. 

We need lot of visibility into all the key functions like OM, PO, etc.  We also have lot of systems running on different platforms. SOA was used as a central hub to orchestrate all of that.

I want to see easier integration connections with other cloud-based tools. 

We have been using this for eight years.

There were some issues with deployment. It would help if there were a feature or add-on for connecting major repository versions.

Service orchestration using BPEL and OSB is the feature most used. JMS integration for reliable messaging is probably the most valuable feature.

Pub/Sub is an integration pattern very commonly used. SOA/WebLogic provides easy-to-use JMS services that can be used in BPEL or OSB. This is the only way to guarantee the delivery of messages. Any message that needs guaranteed delivery has to go over JMS.

The product allows loose coupling between applications. We no longer use point-to-point integration or tightly coupled integration. This provides reusability of services and ease of integration.

In the previous 11g release, there wasn't any straightforward support for calling or exposing REST services with JSON payloads. REST support was released with version 12c (12.1.3 to be specific). With this version, a REST adapter was introduced, which can be used for calling REST services or exposing OSB or BPEL as a REST service. Embedded JavaScript inside BPEL was another new feature to help work with REST/JSON services. It was all good, but using them is not very straightforward. There's no proper documentation or tutorial for embedding JavaScript.

We have been using this solution for about seven years now. We started with version 11.1.1.4.

A new deployment or proper deployment takes a lot of time, planning and researching. Once you get your topology right, then scaling the infrastructure is not a big issue. Again, the documentation needs to be more specific about the things you need to keep in mind when starting with a new deployment.

I would rate it no more than 2.5/5. This is where they need to really improve the turnaround time. Issues usually take a bit of time to resolve. It's not an ideal scenario if you have a production issue.

We have used some parts of TIBCO BusinessWorks before. We did evaluate some other products and looked at Gartner, etc. Based on our experience and customer relations with Oracle, we decided to go with it.

Initial setup in the previous version was quite complex. It has improved a lot in the 12c version. Still, you need to configure quite a few things before you get it right. Some of the things are not easy to configure. Also, there are number of places where configuration is required and that makes it a bit tricky.

I will skip ROI. About pricing, if you have a good relationship with Oracle, it helps.

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.