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Oracle SOA Suite

by Sherry Kercher

Copyright 2020, Faulkner Information Services. All
Rights Reserved.

Docid: 00011355

Publication Date: 2007

Report Type: PRODUCT

Preview

Oracle’s SOA Suite is part of the company’s Fusion Middleware portfolio
and is designed to allow large-scale organizations to deploy
service-oriented architectures (SOAs) across disparate on-premise, cloud,
and business-to-business networks. This infrastructure model breaks down a
company’s processes into reusable services, which can be integrated widely
across most network platforms. SOA Suite 12c includes elements of
Analytics, Orchestration, Service Virtualization, and Connectivity. This
report looks at the complete Oracle SOA Suite 12c.

Report Contents:

• Description
• Related Faulkner Reports
• Vendor
• Applications
• Environment
• Support
• Pricing
• Competitors
• Web Links

Description

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The Oracle SOA Suite is a major software product line for managing a
service-oriented architecture (SOA). It is part of Oracle’s Fusion
Middleware family and offers coverage to support an organization’s
applications, servers, and cloud platforms, both native and third-party.
This includes application and service integration across cloud, mobile,
Internet of Things (IoT), and on-premise deployments.

SOA is a software design and architecture pattern that operates
independently of a third-party technology to provide application
functionality as services to other applications.

Oracle’s SOA Suite was developed to unify the disparate requirements of
mobile, cloud, and IoT integration, providing a unified, standards-based
platform.

The SOA Suite is designed to:

• Reduce time for new project integration.
• Cut integration costs and complexity.
• Manage business and technology changes.
• Provide end-to-end monitoring with root-cause analysis.
• Increase visibility to better react to business events.
• Ensure high availability and scalability for the digitized platform.

Oracle’s SOA Suite also facilitates the development of enterprise
applications as modular business services. The SOA Suite is designed to
support a number of third-party application servers, both commercial and
open source. The suite also features support for many of the leading and
widely-accepted SOA standards, including SCA and SDO; WSIF; business
process execution language (BPEL), WS-Security; SOAP; XPath;
WS-Addressing; XQuery; WSDL; XSLT; and WS-I.

Using the Oracle SOA Suite, organizations can plug the components into
their heterogeneous IT infrastructures, as well as adopt an SOA at their
own pace, either incrementally or all at once. The components making up
Oracle’s SOA Suite offer common capabilities, including a single
deployment and management model, tooling, end-to-end security, and unified
metadata management.

Versions

Oracle released the SOA Suite 12c in June of 2014. This version
offers unified app integration with streamlined cloud, mobile, on-premise,
and IoT integration capabilities within a single platform, delivering
faster time to integration. It allows users to integrate pay-per-use,
software-based services such as Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Marketing
Cloud, Oracle Services Cloud, and Salesforce.com. Other new features
include functionality to increase productivity such as single click
installer, new debugging and testing capabilities, and templating for
sharing best practices; an optimized runtime to support mission-critical
deployments and Web-scale performance; and mobile integration with
improved support for REST and JSON integration standards as well as
streamlined API management.

In 2020, the current version is 12.2.1.4.0. New features include a
Reference Configuration Domain and support for consuming hybrid
integrations created in Oracle Integration (OIC). Oracle SOA for
Healthcare Integration includes a command-line utility to resubmit an
application message or a wire message for a selected business message. It
also provides the ability to remove the dependency of outbound messages to
ports, as well as a new Session Timeout parameter on the UI Settings page.

Table 1 lists the new and updated software elements found in SOA Suite 12c.

Table 2 breaks down the all the family members of Oracle’s SOA Suite in
greater detail.

Analytics

Oracle’s Analytics software for the SOA Suite includes both Business
Activity Monitoring and Event Processing. These tools were created to
better provide visibility into core business processes, including for
information and processes that have been siloed in individual
applications.

Business Activity Monitoring. Oracle’s Business Activity
Monitoring (BAM) product provides real-time insight into business
operations. This J2EE-based app allows organizations to build real-time
operational dashboards to monitor business processes, services, and
services levels, as well as to track key performance indicators from
processes and services. BAM can also be set up to take corrective actions
to process or service issues, either automatically or by alerting
administrators. Its interactive operational dashboard includes real-time
data and reports that are accessible using a standard Web browser. Alerts
can also be generated and delivered via e-mail, fax, phone, or other
channels.

Figure 1 shows the Business Activity Monitoring tool and how it displays
server statistics.

Figure 1. BAM Tool

Source: Oracle

Event Processing. Oracle Event Processing (OEP)
correlates events across applications and streams, including those with
millions of events per second, and can detect patterns and process
geo-spatial information in real time. This can assist organizations with
“always-connected” devices that send large amounts of information that is
useful only when correlated with other sources, using information analyzed
in real time from phone applications, credit card transactions, and user
information stored in memory grids, NoSQL and HDFS stores.

Figure 2 shows Oracle’s Event Processing Visualizer.

Figure 2. The Event Processing Interface

Source: Oracle

Orchestration

Oracle offers a series of orchestration products for automating the
arrangement, coordination, and management of a SOA.

BPEL Process Manager. Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager
provides a standards-based interface for creating, deploying, and managing
cross-application process orchestration. It offers a native BPEL engine
for Web services orchestration. This engine allows organizations to
design, define, and execute services into their business processes. The
standards-based BPEL Process Manager features a graphical Process
Designer, which is available as a plug-in to the JDeveloper or open source
Eclipse environment, delivering organizations a unified design time
environment. The Process Manager also offers wizards to simplify tasks
such as connecting to IT systems and setting up human workflow steps. Also
included is a Web-based Console, which is used for the management,
administration, and debugging of deployed processes. The Console also
delivers instance-level Audit trails, process history, and process
analysis/reports.

Oracle’s BPEL engine executes standard BPEL processes natively and
provides a capability through which flows are automatically maintained in
a database. The offering comes with built-in integration services
featuring support for XSLT and XQuery transformation, as well as
connectors for a number of applications and legacy systems through JCA
adapters and native protocols. Users can leverage the BPEL Process Manager
for integrating applications and legacy systems, building process-centric
composite applications, automating business processes, and workflow
applications. Figure 2 below illustrates a process architecture with the
BPEL Process Manager.

Figure 3 shows the BPEL Process Manager.

Figure 3. BPEL Process Manager

Source: Oracle

Business Rules. Oracle’s Business Rules tool is designed
to externalize specific business logic and parameters. It can be used to
define, update, and manage key parameters and decision trees that are
likely to change based on business evolution. The Business Rules engine
features a rule-authoring tool, a rules engine, and a software development
kit. The engine is written in Java, while the SDK can generate rules using
custom rules-generating applications.

Figure 4 depicts the Business Rules application.

Figure 4. Oracle Business Rules

Source: Oracle

Service Virtualization & Mediation

Service virtualization is a method for copying specific components in a
heterogeneous, component-based applications such as those driven by
cloud-based environments and SOAs.

Service Bus. The Service Bus tool is an
enterprise service bus (ESB) that provides a virtualization layer for
sustainable integration architecture. It is designed to shield customers
from changes that may occur in the backend, while also hiding from
developers the details of underlying implementations of back-end
applications such as legacy protocols. It delivers messaging, routing, and
transformation capabilities to allow services to be integrated at
development time or runtime. The ESB offers connectivity through Oracle
Adapters, which provide access to most data sources. The tool supports
XSLT and XQuery transformation, Business Rules, Systems Cross References,
and Domain Value Mapping, and comes with a multi-protocol messaging bus
that features support for JMS, SOAP, JCA, WSIF, JDBC, HTTP, and FTP.

Figure 5 below outlines Oracle Service Bus.

Figure 5. Service Bus

Source: Oracle

Connectivity

The SOA Suite features a layer for adding connectivity to virtually any
data source. This includes Oracle Adapters, which are available for more
than 300 packaged cloud-based or on-premise applications, technology
legacy, and mainframes. It also includes B2B and Managed File Transfer
capabilities to extend processes to external business partners.

B2B Connectivity. Oracle’s B2B Connectivity handles a
variety of protocols and formats such as EDI, ebXML, and RosettaNet, to
integrate IT systems with third-party products and standards. This assists
in providing a single method for establishing online collaborations and
automated processes with business partners. The B2B tool allows for
document management, transport and exchange management, partner
management, reports and monitoring, and system management. The tool also
enables the definition, validation, normalization/translation,
identification, correlation, batching, routing, and envelope generation of
documents as defined by individual standards. The translators and Document
Editor are Powered by EDIFEC.

Managed File Transfer. Oracle’s Managed File Transfer
is a new companion product, part of the SOA Suite 12c release,
that provides a global and centralized infrastructure for managing and
monitoring file transfers that are typically handled by FTP.

Cloud Applications Adapters. Oracle’s new line of cloud
adapters are designed to streamline the task of developing and managing
connectivity to cloud applications, helping unify cloud and on-premise
applications in a seamless fashion. Through graphical wizards they reduce
the learning curve often associated with native web services integration,
abstracting the differences of each cloud application.

Application and Technology Adapters. This includes
hundreds of off-the-shelf adapters built for the SOA Suite. They are
available to connect to enterprise applications, such as ERP systems or
CRM applications from a variety of vendors such as Oracle, SAP, and
Microsoft. Adapters are also available for technology and protocols
including SOAP, REST, FTP, Files, Database, AQ, Tuxedo, VSAM, CICS, IBM MQ
Series, and JMS.

Applications

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The SOA Suite 12c was developed to further streamline
integration by unifying the disparate requirements of mobile, cloud and
“Internet of Things” as one unified and standards-based integration
platform. This suite facilitates the development of enterprise
applications as modular business services, which organizations can then
integrate and reuse to develop a flexible, adaptable IT environment.
Businesses can attain improved efficiency and agility through
rules-driven, business process automation with Oracle SOA Suite. Oracle
SOA Suite provides all the capabilities required to:

• Design SOA composite applications with JDeveloper.
• Build process automation, not just though systems but also with people
  through Oracle BPEL Process Manager and its Human Task tools.
• Gain real-time visibility into the operation and performance of
  business processes, along with the ability to respond to specific
  situations, through Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).
• Consistently and simply secure all services through a policy-driven
  integrated security framework and the global policy manager in
  Enterprise Manager.
• Use Oracle’s SOA Service Infrastructure to execute SOA composite
  applications through a unified, optimized infrastructure.
• Manage and monitor all of the above components through a single
  console natively integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion
  Middleware Control.
• Plug in an extensive Governance framework to manage, discover, and
  promote re-use of services.

Environment

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As part of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware Suite, SOA Suite 12c
features support for many different third-party offerings, both natively
and through adapters, and can plug in with most current IT environments.
The components also support a wide range of open standards, including the
OASIS-maintained BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) standard.
Table 3 lists the various support options available for Oracle SOA Suite
12c, as part of the Fusion Middleware portfolio.

Support

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Oracle offerings are supported by the company through a number of
support options. Among the services available to customers are training,
consulting, and outsourcing options. In addition, users can choose to
select from the services offered on the company’s Web site, which include
a FAQ section, online support such as e-mail, and a directory of hotlines
closest to a customer’s region.

Table 4 looks at Oracle’s various support services and resources.

Pricing

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Oracle does not publish the prices for the members of its SOA Suite.
Interested parties can contact the company’s sales staff via the general
inquiries hotline at (800) 392-2999.

Competitors

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Oracle’s SOA Suite 12c competes with products such as HP’s SOA
Systinet; IBM’s Service Oriented Architecture; Software AG’s Service
Oriented Architecture; and TIBCO’s SOA Development Platform and
ActiveMatrix Governance portfolio; as well as competitive offerings from
several other smaller vendors.

Web Links

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• Hewlett-Packard: http://www.hp.com/
• IBM: http://www.ibm.com/
• Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/
• Software AG: http://www.softwareag.com/
• TIBCO: http://www.tibco.com/

About the Author

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Sherry Kercher is an editor for Faulkner Information
Services. She holds a master’s degree in library and information science,
and tracks and writes about storage, communication networks and equipment,
and Internet technologies.

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