I noticed a few areas for improvement in WebLogic Suite. If you use the pure play higher-availability features, then yes, it can be switched over to the other system from the high-availability point of view, but that comes with a certain price. If you prefer simpler high-availability, that requires manual intervention. 

I'd also recommend a tuning feature in WebLogic Suite because it's not self-tuning, and this means you need thorough expertise to do the tuning and leverage the best benefit out of it. If Oracle makes WebLogic Suite automated or self-driven, then it becomes a wonderful product, similar to what Oracle did for the Autonomous Database which is self-driven or has an autonomous operating system.

If automation is added in the next release of the solution, combined with more affordable pricing, though as a technical person, I know how much goes into having automation as a feature, and it could be difficult to lower the price, but if Oracle can do it, then that would make WebLogic Suite better.

A supplier installed the solution. They were managing the solution, and then the contract ended. Then, we faced issues because we did not get the necessary training to use the solution. I had to train myself to use the product. The product is not easy to use if we do not have proper training.

The documentation is too broad. The content search is not easy. We see a lot of sources of information, but we must dig in to get what we need. We need to do trial and error. It might be because there is a lot of information in the documentation.

Cloning and replication (detailed below) could be much more flexible and standardized. WebLogic out-of-the-box installations are only templated and automated for Oracle-packaged applications. For independent installations, answering the myriad WebLogic setup parameters can be quite confusing as to what are the correct parameters, other than the defaults (some of which are not provided).

Probably some greater ability to support API management and some greater ability to do things like supporting Node.js. Obviously they have some of that already in there but just basically getting some additional programming languages so that you can build some application consumption patterns a lot easier. Maybe the ability to create more lightweight containers so you don't have to always create a very heavy WebLogic instance. We've seen WebLogic in the cloud and it works but obviously some more investments into that. The ability to work on Amazon EC2 to be able to scale up provision, de-provision on virtual cores within the Amazon environment and be able to do that quickly and seamlessly for customers. We'd like to see some more features in the future around that.

Cloning and replication (detailed below) could be much more flexible and standardized. WebLogic out-of-the-box installations are only templated and automated for Oracle-packaged applications. For independent installations, answering the myriad WebLogic setup parameters can be quite confusing as to what are the correct parameters, other than the defaults (some of which are not provided.)

While many seasoned DBAs like to attribute how Oracle's 3-click Weblogic "Typical Install" type is easy-peasy, what doesn't meet the road requirements is that 90% of current WLS installs are to support purchased Oracle applications (OBIEE, EBS, SOA Suite, Identity and Access Management, etc.) and not the historic period of when companies bought BEA as an enterprise alternative to Apache.

The OUI templates that come with the packaged applications tend to whizz you through the 27+ pages of the "Custom Install" without guidance as to why you're picking certain options, nor why you should or should not select different options. With most WLS build settings, you can't go back and reconfigure an existing setup once deployed. For example, even though it's the same WLS engine used, I cannot change an EBS configured WLS to run as a SOA Suite shared install. I have to do it again as a separate installation.

Costs customers money and time. Works, yes, but less than efficient.

Deployment and integration should be simplified.

I would like to see the licensing policy simplified.

It is difficult to say which features can be improved at the moment, as we are not working with the most current version and I am not aware of the features offered in the new version. 

Once we catch up and move on to version 12C, we need to see what can be migrated to the cloud. 

It might not be suitable to migrate the systems to the cloud, or maybe only portions of it. For example, it makes sense for our web services to go on the cloud, but not the actual application, the CRM system.

If we are considering the version that we are currently working with, then I would say that it's all fairly straightforward when it comes to using it. However, there are some small things, such as being able to restart clusters, where you can choose to restart each server one by one instead of all at the same time.  

The ripple start is what we refer to as shutting down and restarting one server at a time in a cluster. In other words, when you kick off a ripple start, and it would go through, it will shut down the one instance, and start it up, then it would move to the next one. It wouldn't shut them all down, and I wouldn't have to manually, stop one, start it up, wait for it to come up and then move down to the next one. This solution would benefit from the inclusion of a ripple start function for clusters.

Also, the cloud integration, which I've heard is very strong with Oracle, it's the shift and lift methodology. 

IBM WebSphere used to do things like that, where you could do a ripple start as opposed to shutting everything down and it would manage each one individually. That would be useful. if it's a live environment we have to ripple start. That's the big one, otherwise, we are pretty happy with everything.

The debugging function is nice on the Weblogic, but one thing WebSphere has, is, that you can apply the debugging permanently, or just until the server is restarted. 

That might also be a feature that would be nice on WebLogic, but not critical because we turned it off afterward.

It's definitely a complex solution. It throws at least a million lines of errors just for one password. You can get a small issue that could potentially generate about a thousand of lines with warnings, and those warnings might mean nothing. It will just pop up warnings, so you'd have alerts for nothing. It's not that easy from the admin perspective if you're not really familiar with what you're getting into. It's not 100% GUI, so that you need to know lots and lots of configuration files.

I would like to see Oracle offer the WebLogic Suite in other areas, like SaaS or PaaS. From what I've seen at Oracle World, they're already moving in that direction, so it gives you a broader portfolio or different ways to leverage their technology.

I think the only area where Weblogic could be improved would be if they were to develop a solution for smaller applications. WebLogic is really a solution for enterprise companies, meaning that it requires a lot of RAM. Sometimes you're working on a smaller application but WebLogic still needs a huge amount of RAM for it to work. Jboss or Apache, on the other hand, would start with the minimum amount of RAM, for example, 300 megabytes and with WebLogic, you need 3GB or 4GB. Because it's very heavy, the extraction time is longer compared to other solutions. Jboss would start in seven seconds, whereas WebLogic would start in 40 or 50 seconds. If there was a light version of WebLogic that would be useful. 

I would also like to be able to turn off features. For example, if I don't want to use the GMS, I can't turn it off. 

What I didn't like about it initially was the fact that WebLogic was a purchase from BEA. It wasn't Oracle's product initially, and I found whenever they initially released the product, it was quite buggy. Hence, we didn't move away from Oracle Application Server immediately. Now in the latter versions they seem to have eliminated all the bugs, but I think if Oracle does take over software or middleware from other companies before releasing their own version of it, I think they should be testing it a little bit more to eliminate any bugs before it goes in the market.

Also, our WebLogic and Oracle Linux are bound together, that's what we were looking for as our High Availability solution. Getting Oracle Linux highly available was difficult, and getting WebLogic highly available was difficult, too. But then trying to put the two products together as well was even more complicated.

Customization is a bit of an issue for us. 

Support could be better. The expertise when we have some Oracle WebLogic issues and challenges is not there. The issues are not being addressed in time. This really needs to be improved going forward.

I would like to see better integration with some of the cloud stuff that Oracle provides. We just went to an Oracle hackathon; a couple of us, a couple of weeks ago. It's a little confusing how the WebLogic Server, the cloud services and some other services interact; we were just trying to see how that works. What's the vision Oracle has bringing those two worlds together? That's what I'd like to see.

The initial setup and administration does require expertise. While bigger organizations can afford to have dedicated horizontal teams, I assume smaller organizations may not be able to afford this. The default setup should include more features such as more scripts and more users with different privileges, which could resolve this issue.

Multi-tenancy is needed. It is starting to come in the latest releases, but it is a very basic multi-tenant feature at the moment. I would like a more enterprise-grade multi-tenancy feature coming into WebLogic. Many organizations use WebLogic for all of their applications, but what we also have to think about is that each application wants to share the platform, and they want some sort of isolation from other tenants or other business units in an organization. How WebLogic addresses that challenge is by having multiple tenants that share the same infrastructure without disturbing each other.

I had issues when I installed the SSL. With WebLogic, it's a very lengthy process.

When you run the WebLogic admin console, it takes a few minutes to come up. Having the admin console come up a little quicker would be an improvement.

There is little to improve, but I would say the deployment process could be more user-friendly. Using staging to secure your deployment environment does bring its problems. They are easy to solve but require access to the drive space.

I am not a very techy guy, though I know how to use the product. Areas for improvement should come from my developer.

Transactions monitoring graphics need to be improved. When I need to monitor sample transaction response times or something similar, I need to use third-party tools. I assume that it is possible to see transaction performances on the WebLogic console with some graphics, so I'd like to have that feature.

All the areas of this program needs to improve. The integration with other providers and the user management could be better, and the upgrades are pretty complicated. So I would like to see that being improved in the next version.

We need to have more adapters and connectors, especially healthcare system adapters. This solution doesn't have connectors to other external applications. We connect with other vendors' and other companies' systems, therefore we have been asking Oracle for specific interfaces because we have been unable to integrate with these systems using any adapters.

Sometimes there are issues when we work on a VM because people use it to put all of their reports on it at the same time. Then I have to restart and rebuild the machine. That is more of an issue with the users though. 

The restart capability needs to be improved because it takes us 15 minutes to restart any application.

This is a heavy application, like everything that comes from Oracle.

Debugging with this solution is tough and a bit complex.

The interface is not very user-friendly.

The patching is painful; if they wouldn’t release as frequently. Every time you have a patch, you have to upgrade. I’d like to see them improve the release of the patches; instead of monthly, maybe every three months; or specify which patches are critical, which everyone should have, and which ones are optional, like how the OS patches are.

Because it's in the middleware layer, I would like to see better scalability for scaling up. Also, they should provide sizing guidelines so that customers can take it and deploy it.

For improvement, I think the area of clusters are sometimes problematic and we do have issues around that.  

The solution needs to share more information in terms of training. There needs to be more documentation involved to help those who are completely new to the product.