| Article / Link | Author | Subject Matter | Connecting |
|---|---|---|---|
| OIC REST API for Lookups | Niall Commiskey | OIC | |
| OIC 4 Netsuite – Polling for New / Updated Customers | Niall Commiskey | OIC | Betsuite |
| Oracle Integration – Adapter Enhancements to Non Oracle Applications | Arvind Venugopal | OIC | Non Oracle |
| Security Improvements for Database & FTP Adapters | Michael Meiner | OIC | DB & FTP |
| November 2020 Update | Antony Reynolds | OIC | |
| Oracle Integration November 2020 update for Oracle Applications Adapters | Prakash Masand | OIC | Oracle Apps |
| How to use the OCI Object Storage from the Oracle Integration Cloud | Daniel Martins Teixeira | OIC | OCI Object Store |
| Choosing Your Update Window | Antony Reynolds | OIC | |
| Announcing The Visual Builder Cookbook | Shay Shmeltzer | VBCS | |
| Connecting to API Gateway from Visual Builder with Authentication | Aparna Gaonkar | VBCS | |
| Global Variable and Data Stitch in OIC | Amit Kumar Suman | OIC | |
| Configure OTM connection in OIC | Amit Kumar Suman | OIC | OTM |
| Send attachment in OIC notification | Amit Kumar Suman | OIC |
Despite it being traditionally holiday season, there have been lots of articles written about OIC, including the prolific Niall Commiskey covering a lot of new OIC features …
Its been a busy month when it comes to blogging for the folks at Oracle, as July saw a new quarterly release with new usability improvements and connectors.
Handling integration between Oracle SaaS applications and modules has been something of an evolutionary journey. A couple of years ago if you wanted to intgrate say HCM and ERP you needed to ICS or OIC to perform the integration.
In many respects this wasn’t such a terrible thing. Technically as it meant that the back end database schema development for each app was not going to be slowed by needing to be mutually dependent with each other. As a result avoiding the complexities of managing a canonical model and ensuring any changes to that model are delivered in a manner that aligns across multiple development teams plans.
Although you can see from a marketing position it might not have seemed so great, as the customer incurs more cost and development effort to realize a process of managing people (HCM) and paying them (ERP) for example.
Things have moved on, and as long as SaaS apps reside in a Global Single Instance (GSI) (i.e. same region, account and deployment) then for the major products (e.g. ERP, CX, HCM, etc) are internally integrated so a person change in HCM will propagate to ERP as necessary. This certainly reduces the need for integration, saving effort (and the cost of needing OIC).
The problem now is understanding which entities in the SaaS apps are integrated out the box if you deploy using the GSI manner. If you have been working from an integration/technology view point with ICS and OIC for a while it is very easy to get sucked into thinking you need to repeat the integration. After all explicitly integrating the apps is how we started out.
Oracle also want to make it very easy for non Oracle products to integrate, so OIC documentation and the many very good blogs from product management and the engineering team focus on external integration which does (for me atleast) lead to thinking about the older way of working.
Recommendation
Look to see if you’re working with GSI deployment or not. If it isn’t a GSI setup then the old way of working is required. If it is, then determine whether the entity or processes are out the box integrated. This is probably best approached from the SaaS documentation today.
Useful Links:
Plenty of good articles published in the last month …
April has been a relatively quiet month article wise after a couple of bumper months. we’re seeing lots of new content already for May.
| Article / Link | Author | Subject Matter | Connecting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Token required to provision an Oracle Integration Cloud instance | Ankur Jain | OIC | |
| Why is iPaaS adoption growing to handle integrations in cloud architectures? | Daryl Eicher (Oracle) | OIC | |
| Creating net new apps on top of Netsuite with OIC Visual Builder | Niall Commisky (Oracle) | VBCS + OIC | NetSuite |
| Monitoring API – Getting Activity Stream data | Niall Commisky (Oracle) | OIC | |
| Triggering an OIC integration via OCI Events – the Notifications Service Approach | Stan Tanev (Red Thunder Blog) | OIC | OCI |
| The 5 Pillars of Intelligent Invoice Processing | Daryl Eicher (Oracle) | OIC/Arcivate | RPA |
| B2B – EDI Translation support | Niall Commisky (Oracle) | OIC | EDI |
| B2B Document Management | Niall Commisky (Oracle) | OIC | EDI |
| Process large file (above 10MB) in Oracle Integration Cloud Service (OIC) | Harshit Yadav (K21 Academy) | OIC | |
| SOAP Vs REST APIs In Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) | Harshit Yadav (K21 Academy) | OIC |
A couple of days ago the updates for OIC included a new feature B2B (April 2020 new). Specifically, support for EDI X12. Whilst this doesn’t mean SOA Suite B2B is redundant yet (as that still offers a broad range of other complex exchange protocols HL7, EDIFACT, SAP iDoc – complete list here). I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle considers leaving behind support for one or two of the more complex file formats such as EDIEL. But with X12 cracked, I wouldn’t be surprised to see EDIFACT follow soon.
SOA CS future?
So where does the leave SOA CS given one of the differentiators to OIC was the existence of the B2B and MFT elements? OIC has not yet fully displaced SOA and SOA CS, there are use cases that OIC can not yet fully address. For example in the MFT space OIC has caps on filesize (whilst MFT does not). MFT also supports Applicability Statement (AS) standards (IETF specification for AS2). Unlike some of the payload formats, particularly the metadata-driven ones we may see fall away more quickly, the AS standards provide the means for communications to be responded with a ‘Message Disposition Notification‘ (MDN) which means the receiver will tell the sender the receiver has safely and fully received the communicated payload – non-repudiation. We have seen banks and other data-sensitive organizations continue to use such standards (after all you want your employer saying they told their bank to pay your salary, and the bank say, nope not got anything or transfers between the bank and the tax man).
How quickly these gaps will be addressed in OIC is not clear, or whether these cases will be addressed, or whether SOA will continue to answer these edge cases until superseding standards and techniques make them redundant.
The bottom line is there are too many customers with legacy estates on-prem for SOA CS to be retired any time soon. However, I would not be surprised if SOA follows the route of ODI when it comes to Oracle Cloud. Oracle has developed ODI on Oracle Cloud Marketplace, which provides an on-prem style deployment configured (and presumably tuned) to run on Oracle Cloud as an IaaS Virtual Machine. This potentially simplifies the BYOL license model leaving the customer responsible for a level of patch maintenance (be that take a new ODI Marketplace instance spin it up and apply the configuration, then drop the old one, or run the traditional patch processes).
We will see SOA continue to be patched and maintained for a long time to come. But I wouldn’t surprised if Oracle makes it more and more attractive for SOA customers to use OIC – possibly combining OIC and their SOA Suite instances with a view that when customers need to update migrations, they consider the port.
Whilst this may sound like Oracle are potentially leaving customers without the infamous paddle. However, our experience in the partner space is that Oracle seeks to enable them and recognize that most partners are very capable. Not to mention, when the heat is on, partners with middleware Aces can usually find their way through the Oracle organization to get what is needed.
I think we’ll continue to see a number of Oracle’s specialist partners file the gap with tooling adapted from on-premise solutions. It is these partners that also have the wealth of expertise on knowing to get the most out of SOA Suite and keep it secure.
Finally …
So OIC will continue to absorb capabilities that had separated it from SOA suite cementing it as the mainstream offering. But the old warhorse will be around for a long time (remember many older companies still use Cobol successfully) yet. To use a car analogy, those sticking with their trusty vintage Mark 1 Golf that has done 500,000 miles will have to stop looking to the manufacture for service and parts and enlist the support of a passionate specialist.
To be clear, this is only our opinion, and not informed or confirmed by Oracle.