Integration Cloud or SOA Suite? by Phil Wilkins

A periodic conversation I get involved is the relationship between Oracle’s SOA Suite and Integration Cloud. We’ve long held a view based on our conversations with Oracle product management.

There is a formal statement of direction for SOA Suite available ….

The bottom line as we read it:

• SOA Suite isn’t going to be scrapped and customers will not be forced onto Integration Cloud.
• Future changes are going to be on making transitions easier to the cloud, and a customer decision to adopt OIC.
• Releases will focus on keeping things up to date and aligned with the underlying technologies from Java 8 to Java 11 as a long term release of Java. WebLogic version updates.
• We’ll see mechanisms to cloud deliver integrations as the primary focus.

Our interpretation…

So SOA Suite isn’t going away. This doesn’t surprise, we’ve held this view as the customer base is significant. As SOA Suite often goes hand in hand with customers using EBusiness Suite (EBS) which is going to be supported into the 2030s there will be a lot of resistance to replace the software central to getting data in and out of EBS.

Function development in the document doesn’t feature very highly. This reflects the fact that firstly SOA Suite is pretty mature, and the principles of abiding by the standards such as BPEL constrain evolution. While SOA Suite is not going away, the bulk of development effort is going into OIC such as functionality that can provide the features like the Managed File Transfer (MFT) extension to SOA and B2B (support for edifact data flows.

Development is driven by largely by the underpinning technologies such as WebLogic which has seen some significant changes to support more cloud native deployments such as containerisation. Plus the newest versions of the J2EE standards. This where we believe most changes to SOA Suite will come from.

Looking at the changes visually

We have expressed visually the evolution of OIC from its discrete services of ICS (Integration Cloud Service), PCS (Process Cloud Service) etc to the combined product With this we have overlaid the non cloud products of SOA Suite and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) its bulk data partner. The following image sequence shows how we have seen the landscape change.

The 1st PaaS capabilities running on OCI Classic. With OIC not present as the different areas that no form OIC where available separately. Read the complete article here.

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