Implementing Oracle Integration Cloud

Understanding Integration Cloud and how to get the most out of your implementation

Month: February 2019

Continuous Integration & Deployment with OIC

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On February 21, 2019

In General Integration, General Updates

Whilst OIC is not a traditional development environment, once you get past simple integration development you’re going to want to start implementing some configuration management controls and release promotion mechanisms.  We discussed this in the book, and illustrated how this can be achieved in a simple manner using the OIC APIs.

However this can be further simplified, and consolidated so that a configuration management approach doesn’t just work for OIC, but can be applied to other products both in the Oracle cloud and beyond.  Flexdeploy from Flexagon, has long provided this kind of tooling around Oracle’s SOA Suite but over the last couple of years has been addressing the same challenges for Oracle’s cloud offerings.

When we have spoken with Flexagon about the tool’s capabilities we found a product that very feature rich and addressed all the use cases we could identify as being needed.  However, rather than take our word for it, checkout the following resources:

Integration with APIless Systems – Leveraging RPA – Definitive Tip #10

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On February 17, 2019

In Definitive Tips, General Integration

Traditionally integrating with systems that don’t offer APIs or a shared storage mechanism (such as open tables) has been something of a headache often resulting in the ‘last mile’ of the integration process being manual. The manual steps often come because the cost of building and maintaining the means to integrate has not been cost effective or even an option (vendor has end of lifted a product, and not willing to add an integration mechanism).

The idea of ‘screen scraping’ isn’t new, but the cost of implementing such mechanisms has dropped and the new generation of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools such those provided by UiPath have made it significantly easier to integrate and automate UI driven processes. Whilst UI based integration isn’t recommended as a first option for integration, it shouldn’t be ruled out particularly as it gets easier and easier to generate and maintain the UI automation. There are several factors that need to be considered as to whether such an approach is appropriate, for example:

  • the ability to run a robot to execute the UI interaction,
  • the volume of data needing to be moved through the UI – you wont escape the latency issues that may exist with UI steps,
  • is the UI being automated changing rapidly (is there enough cost benefit for automating)

1Oracle have been working in partnership with one of the leading RPA product vendors – UiPath, which has resulted in an adaptor for Oracle Integration Cloud.  The adaptor allows you to pass data to the UiPath Orchestrator component which will run the processes in an unattended mode.  In the adaptor configuration you provide information about how many resources you want the Orchestrator to apply to the task, the queuing of the job and so on.

UIP_4698_WEBSITE-GRAPHICS_WEB_100518

UiPath’s Architecture

for more information on RPA and the adaptor the following links maybe of help:

Whilst Oracle’s roadmap in the RPA space is not entirely clear we have heard indications that Oracle are limiting themselves to just UiPath (this is what UiPath say about the partnership).

Regardless of the approach you’ll see that the adoption of RPA is important in Oracle’s vision, with their Agile Finance making a clear indication of its view (see the paper here).

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