Oracle SOA Suite Reviews & Insights

Oracle Service BUS is being within my department to interact with vendors web services. It addresses integration issues. It handles it in a loosely coupled manner. It allows service providers and consumers to communicate using different protocols. It has the ability to map or transform data. It also routes service requests to provider based on a static or variable criteria. It also protects enterprise services from unauthorized access.

It is well suited for interacting with various web services that are SOAP or REST based. It provides great flexibility. It is definitely not appropriate for complex developments that require orchestration. It is not well suited for agile development like what is being done with microservices today. It does not support using the console concurrent deployment of multiple web services.

We have oracle service bus to proxy and server more than 200 endpoints. We mostly proxy many legacy systems that expose their functionality as a SOAP web service. We have also built full-fledged services which also are providers and not just consumers. It's not used across the organization.

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.

My Organization is a consulting firm and I implement Oracle Service Bus (OSB) at various end customer and I use it by myself as well.

This is an integration tool to provide a pipe to integrate between applications. OSB follows Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). OSB is very popular for virtualization requirement. OSB's components like Proxy Service and Business Service made virtualization easy. OSB addresses Integration and virtualization by a single tool.

OSB is a great tool and works well for both Integration and virtualization. Now OSB is available on the cloud as part of SOACS. The customer has a choice either to go with a cloud version or an on-premise version. There is another newer cloud-based integration platform (iPaaS) called Oracle Integration Cloud. OSB may not be the best fit for Bulk and batch integration as well as for complex integration/orchestration.

A few years back our university made a transition to a more service-oriented architecture. We use Oracle Service Bus to orchestrate web services consumed by our applications. Our information services department has to expose data to outside applications and vendors. We do that through web services hosted on Oracle Service Bus.

In comparison to Open source products like Apache Camel and Mule ESB, Oracle ESB is more robust and offers better enterprise capabilities. However, the licensing costs are fairly prohibitive and are preventing widespread product adoption. At our university, we had already purchased the Oracle Campus Solutions ERP suite and hence had little problems integrating their OSB as well.

At US Cellular we use Oracle Service Bus to manage/orchestrate web services. Oracle Service Bus is really the middle layer for our applications in the Information Services department integrated with third party vendors coming externally and to the back-end vendor product services. Various types of web services that are developed and hosted on Oracle Service Bus include web order management, subscriber services, and online payment services.