The features we've been installing are really, really robust. The only challenge that we have down here is that most individuals have not improved so much. But the features are quite mature. The only tenant is that they would not have enough knowledge to be able to interact with those features and integrate them with their systems. So, to improve other than the training or the performance of those that are using the package.

Another area of improvement is performance. Because with multiple solutions connecting to the SOA platform, in time, the performance of the SOA platform can be affected. So, that could be one area that could be improved with the SOA.

Also, licensing is another area of improvement. It seems to be a high cost, especially for our customers. So that is something that we might look at improving.

The deployment could be made easier by including add-ons like Hudson and Maven. The add-ons and tools for deployment need to be improved. Patches should also be improved. Most of our clients are heading towards the cloud.

The cloud integration features need to be improved. Almost most of the integration solutions are UI based. Those are very lightweight solutions, whereas SOA Suite is heavyweight. The product should become more lightweight, and it should be UI based.

One area that could be better is the human task feature. It could be improved to provide more functionality and customization options because it has limited options available. Human tasks involve workflows where users can provide inputs to the process integrations. So I would like to see improvements and expanded features for human tasks.

In future releases, I would like to see improved connectivity with cloud applications and better adapters. Specifically, we need better adapters for Microsoft Dynamics, as we currently lack inbuilt adapters for that system. So, I like to have improved connectivity with cloud apps.

There needs to be separate guided learning for the usage of tools. It's also not developer-friendly.

The solution’s initial setup is complex and could be improved. A big challenge for Oracle SOA Suite is that you don't get too many technical resources.

Various parts of SOA, BPEL, and so on, each have their own consoles which need to be accessed individually with different logins. It would be better from an admin perspective if all the consoles were accessible via a single login.

I would like to see divided containers more separately as a microservice.
Try to convert more in microservices and be less monolith than it is, because at this time it is more monolith than microservice.

An area for improvement in Oracle SOA Suite is the cost. It could be lower. My company even thought about moving to an open-source product, WSO2, but decided that microservice architecture would be best for the company's architectural approach and use cases, such as building systems.

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.

Other solutions might be better componets such as Salesforce. 

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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'd like to see more plug-and-play adapters, preferably similar to Cloud Integration's browser-based adapter. It saves time to cope with the ever growing business and to meet requirements in more a more agile manner.

I would like to see better mobile-friendly services. Desktop use is diminishing and customers have moved to smart phones and other Mobil devices . SOA has some mobile services already, but they're not very user-friendly (may be also depending on what version of SOA you are using). We would like to see a focus on mobile-friendly web services moving forward.

The second important aspect I would like to get improved is the User Interfaces. Especially for troubleshooting purposes, I do see a room to improve how a support executive can figure out an issue. In the current world a lot of troubleshoot happens by viewing a payload , which is not the best way to figure out a problem. A better UI can help to minimize the troubleshoot time.

The solutions can improve the communication or translations between formats, such as JSON and XML. The JSON REST API could improve.

More cloud adoption would be good because SOA Suite has a lot of adoption for a lot of on-premise customers and they're just getting started with the cloud adoption model. We'd also like to see some more lightweight, light-scale versions of it. It's like one of their greatest assets can also be one of their greatest detriments which is it comes so feature-rich in such a big product that it sometimes can be an expensive product. Some customers just want a low-scale, lightweight version of the tool and we see quite a bit of need for that. Some improvements on API management, the ability to create APIs on top of services to manage those and the analytics of those, would be some good features that we'd like to see as well.

There are networking and firewall issues that tend to delay our projects. I believe that is the case with any middleware.

The documentation and details can be a little better, and more user-friendly. They supply lots of documentation but finding what we need is challenging at times.

There is room for improvement in terms of support.

In the next version of this solution, I would like to see improvements made to the test environment for real-time testing. There is a lot of new software that isn't there until you deploy, which means that you cannot test real-time.

The product is very good considering tracing, ease of use and troubleshooting.

However, the development environment requires a big machine with potent CPU/memory, and SOA server takes many minutes to be up, you can't run anything else on the computer.

In production, when you have lots of composites running on the SOA server, it takes up to 30 min to restart the server.

Microservice was created to solve these weaknesses of standard SOA approach.

I’d like to see more integration with Salesforce. That's one thing that I think they're still in the inception phase. I think a more robust solution for Salesforce would be good.

While the product is technically good, my biggest complaint is that there's a lack of the ability to find good support in the IT community for it. This isn't an issue with Oracle support, but rather with finding someone who manages it and who knows what's going on with it. It doesn't seem to be the usual Oracle product that really takes a bit of skill in order to manage it correctly. There's a market for SOA Suite administrators that's separate from regular DBAs. So that's my biggest complaint -- finding the right community support for it.

The error reporting can be improved. When you get an email saying that something has gone wrong or something is not complete, it isn't very intuitive. It has to go to a very technical person to be able to tell you what actually the error is and what you need to know about it.

I think it has already improved quite a bit. At the system level, when you are running a website, it should be easier to diagnose the source of problems, for example, why the CPU is high, and make the error logs and log files easier to work with to find why an issue happens. Sometimes the Java can be a bit tricky to diagnose the actual problem. I think probably this area can be improved.

API Management and BPM both need work, but I believe Oracle is already working on this.

Customers experience issues standing up environments. Unless an experienced administrator is involved, having an environment that is clustered and load balanced requires quite a bit of time. There are third-party tools to automate this configuration, but there is nothing currently out of the box to ease difficulty the installation issues customers run into.

There is a dashboard available in SOA Suite, and it's called BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), however, very often, clients need more customization, and this is limited. I want more customization in BAM.

The resiliency of this application can have problems with a downstream system., sometimes it's unable to recover quickly. You have to restart the services. However, this is most likely because I'm using an old version, which is 12.1.3, but if I upgrade to 12.2, then that will problem will be resolved. I'm in the process of thinking of upgrading it.

The Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which is JDeveloper in this case. Also, the integrated development environment could be better in some points such as the stability and the comprehensibility of errors.

EDIT: The Maven integration in JDeveloper is very basic and might be enhanced to allow the proper use of Maven.

This version supports Maven for the first time. Some features need to be added for a complete support. A system trace for Oracle support would be useful.

Right now, we plan to go into the 12C version of it, at this point, we're doing a side-by-side upgrade. We like a few features of the 12C version which we are coming up with. The Salesforce adapter, which comes along with it, and as we keep growing and want to add more services, we will be looking at the new features which are available in 12C.

Managing (infrastructure) database growth and performance tuning can be a challenge. The product provides many options for implementing integrations, which is a strength, but sometimes it is also a challenge choosing the best solution.

It depends a little bit on the perspective. From my perspective, I think the development experience, the refactoring, could be improved. And the way that the design-side metadata storage is implemented.

I think from an organizational perspective, the audit options can be improved by making it easier in terms of business terms. A lot of the new features that they're implementing right now, I think will help that. It's not just technical, but also has more business semantics.

The installation of the product is fairly cumbersome. The user interfaces for viewing data flows (consoles) seem to lag under load. Application server thread management can be improved.

The product is very capable, it has a lot of features, but that makes it very complex to manage, maintain, install, patch, and monitor. Since we are moving into an age of DevOps and smart automation I'd like Oracle to invest in ways where it can improve the developer productivity and the way our infrastructure can be managed, self-healed, self-monitored, and give you indications of where the lights are on or off. There are different products at the moment, but that means integrating with those products again. If you step into that thing, you have to buy five different products from Oracle and include them all together to have this functionality achieved. If it's such a good platform for middleware, it should have those features as well.

Framework extensibility needs to be worked on.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

Decrease the number of internal resources which the product uses. 

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

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.

Granted, we're not on the newest and latest version, but there are some performance and reliability issues with the SOA Suite. We're constantly having issues. We have some scheduled scripts to run and they bounce around SOA Suite weekly, so there's definitely room for improvement there.

There is always room for improvement, but it has shown a continuous growth in functionality. Nevertheless, the stability when used with JDeveloper needs improvement.

This solution should allow for data output to spreadsheets and other formats. During training, it is necessary to be closer to the end user to properly manage the product.

In my opinion, an important aspect that will probably be covered in future versions is support for micro-services and the ability to scale on PaaS and Docker-like environments.

• SOA
• AP
• AR

My one big improvement would be to make the ID tool that the developers use to develop a lot of these applications better. It could be more stable and the performance can be improved. As a developer, me and my team face the most challenges installing it. It's very memory intensive and it crashes a lot. They could definitely improve on that.

As this is not the best product, it comes with minor or major bugs which Oracle keeps improving from time to time. For example, it loads and works slowly, using huge amounts of CPU and RAM. It'd like to see it work more smoothly in the next versions. Also, the support system could be improved, as tickets keep rolling, shift by shift for many days.

It should provide better log management and an easier tool for configuration.

There are still some problems that are not covered. The login mechanism still creates issues when it is not configured properly. The monitoring in general is complex. I think that there are some integrations with the cloud and mobile that need to be taken care of.

There are a lot of features that we aren't using, though we're already using the management tools to help us manage our transactions. But, there are some features that aren't available to us, and we're hoping that when we upgrade, there will be additional management features to help us more.

Although the SOA Suite solutions integrate well with Oracle Fusion middleware products, it lacks similar integration with Enterprise Manager. This is something that, in my experience working with clients, is needed for SOA Suite to be a better product.

The installation and adjustment process seems too complex. Would it be possible for the software to be installed in a short click?

SOA, OSB, SOA Cloud Service.

An area with some room for improvement is the development tool used (JDeveloper) with regard to stability.

Also, there are three administration consoles available with some overlapping functionality, which should be better segregated.

• More Maven support
• Improved file-transfer adapter
• Large payloads need to be made easier to use

It needs improvement in terms of Windows support. Actually, it's there but is not that good. So, I need something on Windows support.

Right now, the availability of quicker releases is delayed. In the mobile world, you need it right now; you can't afford to wait. I don't want to wait for six months to get it. If I have faster features availability, that would be great.