Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Service Bus
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.
- Ease of usage from the infrastructure point of view, like the interface to navigate to different functionalities, is really good.
- Issue troubleshooting using message reports is very efficient in narrowing down the issue and identifying the root cause.
- Ability to update the business service endpoints globally swiftly by using some of the administration features.
- Average response time of each and every service operation can be found at one stop.
- Message reporting tied to a database seems counter productive. Better options to eliminate that would not only minimize the maintenance hassle but also gives more ease to manage the product.
- Polling feature isn't very efficient where the end point JMS queues may still have JMS connections despite not enabling the corresponding poller proxy services.
- Unable to deploy multiple web services in one go from the OSB Web console.
- Oracle Service Bus definitely provides an excellent Service Bus solution at US Cellular to orchestrate web services, interface between outbound 3rd party vendor services the back-end systems
- Still not utilizing 100% of the product featuers, such as the various adapters available, to maximize the RoI. So, would like to explore leveraging all the features while we migrate to OSB 12c.
- On the flip side, high license costs is a matter of concern. Since there are lot of open source tools with less support costs, we may want to explore those options for optimizing the costs we spend
- Tibco ActiveMatrix Service Bus, Mule ESB and WebSphere Message Broker
Mule ESB is an open source tool and would definitely cost less, however is not as sophisticated a product for the business functionality we need at US Cellular.. I have reviewed IBM WebSphere Message Broker, is very cumbersome and not very user friendly. Despite some of the license cost concerns, Oracle Service Bus stands out as an ideal Enterprise Service Bus solution at US Cellular.