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IBM Business Automation Workflow vs. Oracle SOA Suite

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Business Automation Workflow

    Score9.7 out of 10
    N/AIBM Business Automation Workflow is a solution that helps users automate digital workflows to increase productivity, efficiency and insights — on premises or on cloud.N/A

    Oracle SOA Suite

    Score8 out of 10
    N/AThe rapid adoption of cloud-based applications by the enterprise, combined with organizations’ desire to integrate applications with mobile technologies, is dramatically increasing application integration complexity. Oracle SOA Suite 12c, the latest version of the company's unified application integration and SOA solution, offers a simplified cloud, mobile, on-premises and Internet of Things (IoT) integration capabilities within a single platform.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM Business Automation WorkflowOracle SOA Suite
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM Business Automation WorkflowOracle SOA Suite
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    IBM Business Automation WorkflowOracle SOA Suite
    Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of IBM Business Automation Workflow and Oracle SOA Suite
    Feature
    IBM Business Automation Workflow
    10.0
    4 Ratings
    20% above category average
    Oracle SOA Suite
    -
    Ratings
    Dashboards10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Standard reports10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Custom reports10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Process Engine
    Comparison of Process Engine features of IBM Business Automation Workflow and Oracle SOA Suite
    Feature
    IBM Business Automation Workflow
    10.0
    4 Ratings
    18% above category average
    Oracle SOA Suite
    -
    Ratings
    Process designer10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Process simulation10.03 Ratings00 Ratings
    Business rules engine10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    SOA support10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Process player10.03 Ratings00 Ratings
    Support for modeling languages10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Form builder10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Model execution10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Collaboration
    Comparison of Collaboration features of IBM Business Automation Workflow and Oracle SOA Suite
    Feature
    IBM Business Automation Workflow
    10.0
    3 Ratings
    17% above category average
    Oracle SOA Suite
    -
    Ratings
    Social collaboration tools10.03 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Management Capabilties
    Comparison of Content Management Capabilties features of IBM Business Automation Workflow and Oracle SOA Suite
    Feature
    IBM Business Automation Workflow
    10.0
    4 Ratings
    20% above category average
    Oracle SOA Suite
    -
    Ratings
    Content management10.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    User Ratings
    IBM Business Automation WorkflowOracle SOA Suite
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (8 ratings)
    8.0
    (9 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM Business Automation WorkflowOracle SOA Suite
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    Have your process first on paper Its important to first document the process before venturing into BPMS. It will save a lot of pain and heartaches. A BPM tool is no magic bullet, it merely automates your process. Its upto you to put visibility and tracking on top of it. Provide monitoring so that you get a chance to improve your process continously. BPM is not an application If you are trying to build an application with BPM, chances are that your are alraedy failing. BPM must be a strategic initiative for an organization. Yes, you build Dashboards, Reports and other software in BPMS, however you do it at a process level not at an application level. http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/bpm-initiative.html Know the difference between process data and business data http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/lombardi-best-practices.html http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2012/02/bpm-system-architecture.html
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    Oracle
    Oracle service bus is great to quickly proxy any legacy services exposed as soap service. It's well suited for aggregating multiple services on a single endpoint. We can point to multiple endpoints on the business service and use a round-robin approach to access the endpoints. It's not well suited for data transformation and quick preview of mappings and transformations. It's not great on path to cloud transformation.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    IBM
    • System does a great job normalizing business process and automating order processing tasks. Before TeamWorks, the process was much more manual and more expensive staff ($65k to $70K) were required to manage the process. Since implementing TeamWorks, we need much lower-skilled workers to manage order processing.
    • System ensures that we have consistent data across all systems.
    • Rules engine is really the “company playbook” – it is the heart and soul of how the company works. It handles thousands of orders per day
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    Oracle
    • The Oracle Service Bus makes the management of web services extremely easy. Through its point and click interface, the web service endpoints can be easily modified.
    • The administration console provides useful dashboards to diagnose any service issues.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    IBM
    • The system gets crashed when many instances go into the queue stage. The system even crashes and sometimes restarts automatically when the load on the server increases. We had to develop a separate software for this and maintain the same.
    • We cannot manipulate the data during run time. It is difficult to develop user-interfaces with complex functionality.
    • In order to consume external services that follow HTTP protocol, we need to use IDE for that, and consuming services from IDE takes a lot of time to give a response.
    Incentivized
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    Oracle
    • Message reporting tied to a database seems counter productive. Better options to eliminate that would not only minimize the maintenance hassle but also gives more ease to manage the product.
    • Polling feature isn't very efficient where the end point JMS queues may still have JMS connections despite not enabling the corresponding poller proxy services.
    • Unable to deploy multiple web services in one go from the OSB Web console.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    IBM
    This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.
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    Oracle
    We have had not many issues with Oracle Service Bus and it's very stable for our requirements. It's highly available and helps us implement Tier1 applications on it.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    IBM
    • The system is easy enough to use but, by definition, is a complex tool. However, they have done a good job generally balancing tool complexity / capability with usability. When comparing to MS Biz Talk, for example, Biz Talk has less functionality but is actually harder to use.
    • Software is very flexible. For somebody with the right technical background, it’s quite easy to write some Java code to overcome any hurdles or make the product do what is needed
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    Oracle
    It's an excellent enterprise service bus and has very stable features. We have been using it since 2008. We did hit into some issues. But, recreating the service helped fix many issues. Also, deployment to various environments was easy. Also, the plugin on Eclipse helps to build proxy and business services quick and easy.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    IBM
    Issues can be raised through tickets and it works based on the priority of the issue. The Support Team response is also good and the solution is provided in a short span of time. In a case where the issue is serious, they try to find out the root cause and provide an alternative for it.
    Incentivized
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    Oracle
    We had some issues with MQ connectivity through OSB and our experience was poor with the support team. They do respond. But, it felt like we are ignored and we had bad support. We had to escalate and things used to get dragged for weeks before we get more quality questions on how to pursue investigation.
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    IBM
    • Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.
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    Oracle
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    IBM
    • Very satisfied – not too difficult at all.
    • We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)
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    Oracle
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    Pega Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product. However Pega, falls short on integration centric capabilities and very rigid to customize. On the other hand IBM comes with array of products which suits needs of varying degree. Advanced integration is solved by BPEL Process Server which has support for state based patterns and mediation. Dynamic rules and event management can be solved with WODM, Cloud to on-premise connectivity with Cast Iron, Enterprise gateway and security usecases with DataPower, Social BPM with IBM BPM , WODM, mobify with Worklight. Pega has a little bit of eveything here and there. It solves the dynamic rule management, brings out the flavor of Social BPM and mobility with Antenna ( I guess) and predictive analytics as well in one single suite. There are certain usecases which needs to have a little bit of everything, however this little bits and pieces of functionality when its blows, Pega would have problems to scale. With IBM its a bit nightmare to maintain a variety of technologies, however you can wish to go for one without the other and go for something only when you truly need it. Pega vs IBM Its difficult to pick a winner. In nutshell when you want a full scale BPM with rich integration capabilities go for IBM BPM. On the other hand if you hava mature integration capability already, Pega can yield quick results for you as well. Pega's strength is its methodology. IBM BPM's strength is integration. Actually you can't go wrong with both in terms of implementation. My strong recommendation is to invest time to process analysis and pick a good vendor to support consulting and implementation.
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    Oracle
    Oracle being the market leader and has a lot of compatibilities with sources like SOA projects, Oracle database and other JMS feeds.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    IBM
    It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load
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    Oracle
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • It has added value to the upper management to give visibility into what is happening at any time in the enterprise.
    • Boosted employee morale because it gives them all the information to work the case/task in a single location.
    • Identifies bottlenecks and improves the turnover.
    Incentivized
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    Oracle
    • Improve customer relations/service
    • Create internal/operational efficiencies
    • Improve business process outcomes
    • Improve compliance & risk management
    • Strong services expertise
    • Pre-existing relationships
    • Strong consulting partnership
    • Product functionality and performance
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots