Review: OIC now has a fourth leg which is Integration Insight, see more details here.
Oracle Integration Cloud (aka OIC) is like the glue or mortar that makes the different parts of an ecosystem of technology puzzle start to look that they fit. OIC is good for hybrid, multi cloud integration and extensions framework.
So, which are those 3 legs or components that OIC provides?
With OIC (and sometimes other auxiliary tools) you can create:
- logic that runs automatically based on events or schedules (integrations)
- business end2end flows (processes) that interact with other business processes, with humans or with other integrations
- rich and responsive user interface applications (visual builder) providing a good user experience that increases productivity, simplicity and efficiency. Le’s explain a little bit each one of those “legs”:
Integrations
Integrations are orchestrations of unary steps (such as a REST call, a database call, a file transfer,..) based in connections and integrations
Connections are plugs to different systems by means of adapters. An adapter is the implementation of a connection to a target system and the API’s it provides.
OIC provides a bunch of connectors, ones are technological (sftp, rest, database, …) while others are industry solutions from SAP to Salesforce and many others like UIPath, DocuSign, Google, LinkedIn and, of course, the whole stack of Oracle SaaS offering (ERP, CX, Netsuite, HCM, SCM, Sales …)
Integrations, are orchestrations of processes based in a graph of unitary processes controlled by flow conditions. Each step can be a service call, database call, a variable mapping between payloads, a condition, a call to an integration or to a bpm process, etc.
Processes
Processes are implementation of Business Process Management (BPM) flows. Processes provides the capability of building Process Applications and Decision Models.
Process Applications are implementation of unary steps with the capability to include human tasks, conditions, exceptions, forms, decisions, integrations, service calls, etc.
Proceses can invoke business models (rules) and can also call Integrations.
Visual Builder
Visual Builder (VB) is a visual development framework based in HTML5, JavaScript, REST and other modern development paradigms.
With VB you can create responsive desktop and mobile applications such as SaaS extensions or mobile applications easily.
Visual Builder is a “citizen programming” tool, which allows creating applications with less or no knowledge of HTML5, JS and other technologies but also offers the power of creating complex solutions because experts can see the generated code and is also extensible by means of components which are reusable pieces that can be built using JET a framework for developing visual applications based in HTML5, JS, jQuery, Cordova, RequireJS, etc.
Visual builder provides and embedded database that allows creating and consuming business objects, which are entities with fields, security, rules, endpoints and data. Endpoints mean that the entities can be exposed as REST services for integration with the rest of the world.
In addition, the embedded database can be replaced by an external Oracle database for mission critical applications that needs scaling, HA, DR, and the like.
OIC is not the only glue for integrations, there are typically other technology ingredients that may fit, such as:
- A container engine like Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE)
- A database such as Oracle Autonomous Database
- A mix of SOA products like service bus, BPEL, etc…
- APEX development framework, which is included for free in the Oracle databse
- File transfer tools
- A CI/CD environment like Oracle Developer Cloud Service
- A pipeline orchestrator like Wercker, JenkinsX, BitBucket, Developer Cloud Service, and more…
- ETL tools such as Oracle Data INtegrastor (ODI)
For more information see here.
That’s all folks! Hope it helps 🙂
approaching off the bow 