Introduction to Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC)

Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) brings together all the capabilities of Application Integration, Process Automation, Visual Application Building and Integration Analytics into a single unified cloud service. 

Key Features:

Integration: Quickly connect to SaaS or on-premise applications seamlessly through 60+ native app adapters or technology adapters. Support for Service Orchestration and rich integration patterns for real-time and batch processing.

Process Automation: Bring agility to your business with an easy, visual, low-code platform that simplifies day to day tasks by getting employees, customers, and partners the services they need to work anywhere, anytime, and on any device. 

Visual Application Design: Rapidly create and host engaging business applications with a visual development environment.

Let's begin with Integration - OIC's integration component. This includes an intuitive web based integration designer for point and click integration between applications, a rich monitoring dashboard that provides real-time insight into the transactions, all of it running on a mature runtime platform on Oracle Cloud, it will help customers accelerate their integration projects by pre-integrating with several SaaS Applications and will significantly shorten their time-to-market through a highly intuitive user interface and a large library of SaaS Adapters.

The Integration component of OIC has the following menu structure -

Lookups - Lookups are essentially Domain Value Maps, these are maps of essentially the same things between different apps e.g. SAP would have a city code as MUM whereas Siebel would have same as Mumbai. We can create a lookup that contains all of these name value pairs and leverage them automatically in an integration mapping, thus automating a tedious task.

Packages - Packages allow us to structure our integrations. We can package all our integrations, Packages can be easily exported/imported and contain all other artifacts used by the Integration.

Agents - Agents are used to connect to On-Premise apps, e.g. SAP, JDE, Oracle DB etc. An Agent is a small piece of software you install in your on-premise environment. It communicates with OIC in the cloud via REST calls over HTTPS.

Adapters - OIC comes with over 70 adapters; you can add your own adapters via our Java based adapter SDK. These adapters cover Oracle and non-Oracle SaaS and on-prem apps; as well as technology adapters such as SOAP and REST.

Libraries - Libraries are JavaScript based and can be added to OIC. 

The main components of  OIC's integration landscape are Connections and Integrations.

A Connection is an instance of an adapter, configured to use a particular endpoint and credentials. 

Oracle Integration Cloud includes a set of predefined adapters to connect various cloud-based applications as well as On-Premise application.  Here is the list of adapters:

Adobe eSign
AQ
Ariba
Concur
DB2
DocuSign
Eloqua
Eventbrite
Evernote
Facebook
File
FTP
Google Calendar
Google Mail
Google Task
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
LinkedIn
Logistics
MailChimp
Microsoft Calendar
Microsoft Contact
Microsoft Email
Microsoft SQL Server
MySQL
NetSuite
Oracle Commerce Cloud
Oracle CPQ
Oracle Database
Oracle DBaaS
Oracle E-Business Suite
Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud
Oracle ERP Cloud
Oracle Field Service Cloud
Oracle HCM Cloud
Oracle Messaging Cloud Service
Oracle Policy Automation
Oracle RightNow
Oracle Sales Cloud
Oracle Siebel
Oracle Utilities
Oracle Weblogic JMS
Responsys
REST
Salesforce
SAP
ServiceNow
SOAP
SuccessFactors
SurveyMonkey
Trello
Twilio
Twitter
Workday

If OIC does not provide an app specific adapter then you can look at using one if the technical adapter ex SOAP,REST,FTP adapter etc.

You can get the complete list of Adapters from Application Connectors | Oracle

Here is a list of the different Integration styles offered by OIC -

Basic Routing Style allows for data movement between two systems, with the ability to add one additional enrichment call during the request and the response. The use-case for this pattern is geared towards getting data from system “A” to system “B” where the transformations are fairly straightforward and there may be a minimal need to collect additional information.

App Driven Orchestration Style allows to create more complicated flows, i.e. invoking calls to external systems, aggregating data and making if/then execution flow decisions based on the data you receive.  

Scheduled Orchestration Style is a variation to App Driven Orchestration where integrations ca be scheduled example Sync Orders from Siebel to Oracle EBS at 11pm everyday. 

File Transfer Style is very simple & can be used to move files from one location to another across the network

The last two Style are for Publish To OIC & Subscribe To OIC messaging. Think of this as using JMS to write and read messages to be leveraged across multiple integrations. In this pattern data would be published to OIC (to an internal Queue) & can consumed by multiple subscribers.

Later blog post will cover these Style more in-depth.

As mentioned earlier for communication with on premises systems, we need to install Agents. We will cover more about agents in upcoming posts.

OIC also has a rich monitoring console to track messages and errors:

You can monitor by integration and connection. Diagnostic and Activity logs can be downloaded as needed. These provide the same type of WebLogic Server logs you would normally see from your application server. These logs can be helpful for debugging and troubleshooting purposes.