My experience with Oracle Integration Cloud Services

My experience with Oracle Integration Cloud Services

Gepubliceerd: Categorie: Oracle

Start of May 2016 we’ve attended an Oracle partner workshop about the Oracle Integration Cloud Services (ICS). Let's take a look at our experiences and views on Oracle ICS. 

In my previous Oracle Cloud blog I have described our experiences with some of Oracle’s cloud solutions. There we’ve discussed the Java, Developer and Oracle Sales Clouds. Today we’ll dive into the Oracle Integration Cloud Services.

So, what is Oracle Integration Cloud Services (ICS)?

Oracle ICS is a cloud based integration platform from Oracle. It offers a user-friendly web-based interface enabling ‘citizen integrators’ to quickly perform some basic mapping and integration between (cloud) applications. Imagine, registering for ICS on the Oracle site, and getting access to an environment immediately. Within a few clicks, and use of a credit card, one can gain access to a cloud integration platform.

With a growing number of available cloud applications (not only from Oracle), customers face the challenge of keeping these solutions in sync. A challenge in which Oracle ICS can help us out!

A typical ICS integration

Typically when using multiple different applications to support your business, it is important to keep systems in sync with each other. A customer in one system, should also (automatically) be entered in the other system. This could also hold for employee records, and various other business entities.

Say for instance a company is using the Oracle Service Cloud (RightNow) for registering and handling customer complaints and requests. And say Oracle Sales Cloud is used by the sales department.

Now imagine a customer who has raised several service requests and complaints because of product defects. And it has been taking months before these complaints have been picked up. These customer interactions are monitored and maintained in Oracle Service Cloud. It would be kind of awkward for a salesperson to go to that particular customer to try to sell new products. Especially when this salesperson is not aware of these complaints.

Having sales people check Oracle Service Cloud for complaints could be one (rather cumbersome) solution. Providing an integrated view to the number of complaints in the Sales Cloud as well, will be far better. Oracle ICS can help customers integrate both cloud solutions to provide such a solution (see figure 1).

Figure 1: One of the ICS labs where we enabled Oracle Sales Cloud to search by customer for incidents registered in the Oracle Service Cloud (RightNow)

Positioning Oracle ICS in relation to Oracle SOA Suite

Oracle also offers their SOA Suite for solving the same integration issues as ICS does. Compared to ICS the Oracle SOA Suite is far richer and more complete. And apart from on premise SOA Suite, Oracle also offers the SOA Suite as a cloud Service (SOACS). So why also offer ICS?

Oracle ICS is positioned for the ‘LOB Developer’ (Line of Business Developer). The developer who actually functionally knows the application’s being integrated. The developer who does not necessarily understand SOAP/REST/XML and other integration related technologies, but does understand the underlying business entities, and which ones should be integrated between applications.

Coming from an Oracle E-Business Suite developer background (LOB Developer) I can really see some benefits to ICS. Developers used to working with PL/SQL, Forms, Workflow, and such, are not necessarily used to working with JDeveloper and integration related technologies. ICS can bridge this gap. Or act as a stepping stone, to do integration the SOA way.

On the other side, a pure SOA developer does not understand the business applications as well as the LOB developer. So by letting the LOB developer participate more easily in a SOA landscape, we bring more application knowledge into the SOA landscape.

Quick ICS introduction

Step by step one implements integration in Oracle ICS as follows:

  1. Create connections
  2. Create integration
  3. Map messages

Optionally one can create lookups and packages (see figure 2).

Figure 2: ICS designer portal as the starting point for defining Connections, Integrations, Lookups or packages

Create connections

The first thing to do is creating connections, using one of the many adapters Oracle provides (see figure 3). Configuring a connection is pretty straightforward, and consists of providing an (WSDL) endpoint and some security credentials. Apart from the technical connection, one also needs to specify what operation is to be invoked.

Figure 3: Some of the adapters available for ICS

The basic technology adapters, such as SOAP or REST, provide just that. A method of communicating over SOAP or REST. When using these adapters, developers need to know and understand which APIs are needed in detail.

More intricate application adapters provide much more. Such as the Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle E-Business Suite adapters. Apart from connectivity they provide security and authentication methods which are aligned with the application. They provide a more logical list of Business Entities, instead of just plain API calls. Some even offer special query languages to find data (see figure 4).

Figure 4: Adapter configuration for RightNow to Create an Account

Currently there are many adapters already available to ICS and many more are coming in next releases (see figure 5 and 6). Not only Oracle’s own applications are supported, but also lots of applications from other vendors (Salesforce, SAP, etc.).

Figure 5: Adapters available for Oracle ICS
Figure 6: ICS Cloud Adapters Roadmap

Create integration

Once all connections are created for both sides to be integrated, we can start defining the integration itself. First one defines which integration pattern to use (figure 7).

Figure 7: Integration Patterns. Apart from mapping data from one source to a particular target, ICS also offers a publish/subscribe interface. Recently also ‘Orchestration’ was added as an integration pattern. It enables some orchestration capabilities, but this does not compare with Oracle BPEL for instance.

Most of the times we have used ‘Map My Data’ as a pattern for the integration of two applications. Secondly, we drag and drop ‘connections’ onto the two drop targets on the integration screen (see figure 8).

Figure 8: Drag and drop the connections to be used in this integration. Connections can be seen on the right side of the screen

Once all connections have been dropped, we can add mappings by clicking the map icons (see figure 9).

Figure 9: ICS Integration for which all connection endpoints have been defined. Ready to define mappings.

Create mapping

In the following example we are mapping an ‘Account’ entity from Oracle Sales Cloud, to an ‘Organization’ entity in Oracle RightNow. Both entities are structured differently so we need to map one type to the other.

Figure 10: ICS Mapper, mapping Account to Organization

The ICS mapper resembles the one available in the Oracle Service Bus XQuery mapper. Apart from mapping one value to another it is also possible to use expressions for more complicated mappings (figure 11).

Figure 11: ICS Mapper, modifying expression

Once all mappings have been completed you’re ready to activate (deploy) your integration and start testing it.

To get a good feel of ICS we recommend viewing the Demos and Movies from the Oracle ICS site [2]. They provide some application integration examples, and tutorials on how to use ICS to create a particular integration.

Prebuilt integrations

Apart from developing your own integrations in Oracle ICS, one can also leverage integrations build by others. According to the documentation and other online resources, there should be some prebuilt integrations from Oracle. These prebuilt integrations offer mappings from one type to the other between Oracles own cloud applications.

Sadly we weren’t able to find them on the Marketplace anymore. This might be because our account did not include a customer ICS subscription? For now we’ll just have to trust on the documentation for this (see figure 12 and 13) [4,6].

Figure 12: List of prebuilt ICS integrations by Oracle
Figure 13: Prebuilt integration to sync accounts from Oracle Sales Cloud to RightNow

Oracle Cloud Marketplace

Although we could not find the prebuilt integration from Oracle on the Marketplace, we did find other interesting offerings. These offerings have been created by other Oracle partners, and are either free of charge, or can be licensed separately.

For instance an integration between Oracle Marketing Cloud to Oracle Sales Cloud, or between Oracle Sales Cloud and Oracle E-Business Suite (figure 14 and 15).

Figure 14: Integration from Oracle Marketing Cloud to Oracle Sales Cloud
Figure 15: Integration between Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Sales Cloud

We’re guessing they might not be using Oracle ICS, but some other integration platform. But this does show opportunities for using ICS as well. Oracle partners (such as ourselves) can also create integrations between different cloud applications and offer these on the Oracle Marketplace themselves!

Either one offers the ICS integration mappings as a zip-file to customers using ICS themselves. Or one could use their own ICS instance to host the entire integration for the customer’s altogether.

Other ICS opportunities include building your own Adapters, or creating apps/views in the cloud (JCS) which can integrate with various customer cloud apps.

Easy to use

ICS looks best suited for cloud-2-cloud integrations. But also cloud, to on premise is supported just fine (by means of agents). ICS enables customers to quickly acquire an integration platform, and it is easy to use.

ICS´ biggest strength is providing multiple different adapters for a variety of cloud based business applications currently on the market. Within a few clicks one can define a connection to the Oracle Sales Cloud, Salesforce, RightNow, SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite and many others. But also integration with other systems using SOAP/ REST/JMS/FTP/DB are supported by using the various technology adapters available in ICS.

ICS key offering in our opinion:

  • Many cloud application adapters
  • Ease of use, user friendly Web-UI
  • No need to provision own servers and software, within a few clicks you can have access to an integration platform

 

References

[1] Oracle Integration Cloud

[2] Oracle Integration Cloud Demos and Videos

[3] Oracle Integration Cloud datasheet

[4] Oracle Cloud Integration Whitepaper

[5] Developing Integration Cloud Services

[6] ICS Prebuilt integration for Sales Cloud

[7] Oracle Cloud Marketplace

Richard Velden
Over auteur Richard Velden

Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer at Qualogy. Specializes in integration and cloud development using Oracle technologies such as: SOA Suite, Service Bus, Integration and Process Cloud.

Meer posts van Richard Velden
Reacties (16)
  1. om 12:12

    How can we integrate ICS with Fusion Product and Customer HUBs

    1. om 11:11

      Hi Praveen,

      From your question I infer you are using on-premise Product and Customer hub.

      The quick answer is, it depends. It depends on which applications need to integrate with product/customer hub.

      Oracle Fusion Product and Customer Hubs provide pre-build integration using Process Integration Packs (PIPs).
      http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/master-data-management/pip-for-oracle-product-hub-168398.pdf

      This is supported between for instance Product hub and 'Siebel CRM, and Oracle E-Business Suite'.

      However, if you need to integrate Product hub with another business application you need to set up integration between these yourself. You could use whatever middleware you want, like for instance Oracle SOA Suite.

      If you need to integrate Oracle Product hub with one of Oracle's Cloud applications (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud etc.), you could use Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) for integration as well.

      Oracle ICS is best suited for Cloud-2-Cloud integration.
      Cloud-2-on Premise is also possible using ICS.
      So integration Product/Customer Hub on premise with one or more Oracle Cloud applications would be a good integration use-case for Oracle ICS.

      But if you only need to integrate between on-premise applications, I would not recommend Oracle ICS. Better stick with on-premise integration tools for these use cases.

      A cloud version of product (and customer) hub exists as well.
      https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/product-mdm-cloud

      Kind regards,
      Richard

  2. om 17:05

    Richard,
    Very good article. The link mentioned is not opening.
    http://www.qualogy.nl/en/techblog/oracle/oracle-paas-for-saas-experiences

    Please share the correct URL of that.

    Thanks,
    Vijay

    1. om 17:05

      Hi Vijay,

      Thanks for letting me know:
      It's http://www.qualogy.nl/techblog/oracle/oracle-paas-for-saas-experiences

      Regards,
      Richard

  3. om 12:12

    Hi,
    Could you please help to create case in salesforce using Oracle ICS.I have doubts regarding required elements for creation of account.

    Regards,
    Shivanand.

  4. om 21:09

    Really well written blog! Summarized beautifully too

  5. om 13:01

    Can we have approval Workflow in ICS?

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  7. om 13:01

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  8. om 12:12

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  11. om 05:05

    Great blog ! What are challenges you see in integrating oracle fusion with legacy apps?

    1. om 11:11

      Hi Umeshwar,

      For Fusion Application I see some challenges in the standard APIs. For instance when one needs to create something in Fusion Apps (like an invoice) one first needs to know several internal Fusion ID's. So one first needs to do a webservice call to fetch for instance a custom_id (party_id) before one can create an invoice.
      But I must add that this has maybe changed a little with later releases of Fusion Apps.
      Ideally you want to create the invoice using no/little internal reference numbers.

      Issues for integrating with legacy apps depend on the legacy apps.
      All legacy apps that do not properly support SOAP/REST APIs might be harder to integrate. But OIC offers enough lower level adapters (database adapter for instance) to interface with these legacy apps. It is also possible to create your own adapter using the Adapter SDK https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/integration-cloud-service/cccdg/cloud-adapter-sdk.html

      Kind regards,
      Richard

  12. om 03:03

    Greetings, thank you for sharing. Currently my company in Mexico has just acquired the Oracle Cloud ERP, but they did not want to spend more on the SOA Suite. What would be the best and not very expensive solution you could recommend? Would it be a homemade solution? thanks for your reply!.

  13. om 09:09

    Hi Aldo,

    This depends on your usecase, and whether you already have SOA Suite. You mention you don't want to spend more on SOA Suite?

    Assuming you don't have an integration soltion yet and you need to integrate Oracle ERP Cloud with other cloud applications I would recommend using Oracle Integration Cloud.
    Also for integrating ERP cloud with on premise applications Oracle Integration Cloud can work fine, using either the agents or a VPN solution between cloud and your on premise systems.


    For a cost estimate Oracle has a very nice cost estimator:
    https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/cost-estimator

    Kind Regards,
    Richard

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