Recap of the "Real-World Cloud Integration Simplified with Oracle SOA Suite" presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2013

I attended this presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 titled "Real-World Cloud Integration Simplified with Oracle SOA Suite" by:

• Raghu Kadirvelu (Bristlecone, Inc.)
• Vikas Anand (Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle)
• Rajesh Raheja (Senior Director, Development, Oracle)

Raghu provided a live demo of multiple integrations between E-Business Suite (which was sitting on premise in their data center) and SalesForce.com (which resided on the cloud). The SOA Suite integrations were built using the new 11g SalesForce adapter, and demonstrated the bi-directional movement of data to satisfy two functional use cases.

Raghu Kadirvelu, Vikas Anand, and Rajesh Raheja taking audience questions

This was by far one of the best SOA presentations I attended at OpenWorld this year, and let me explain why.

At the surface, this appears to be a simple presentation on yet another JCA adapter. But both Vikas (@VikasAatOracle) and Rajesh (@RahejaRajesh) are masters in their domain, and you have to listen closely to them to really understand that these guys are visionaries in their respective fields.

Here are some of the points I appreciated:

• The live demo showcased multiple asynchronous integrations between E-Business Suite and SalesForce, seeing first hand how the end result works. The techies in the crowd got it.
• A walkthrough in JDeveloper of the new 11g SalesForce "cloud" adapter was provided, with mention to some of the various (unique) options specific to the adapter and how Oracle addressed SalesForce API design considerations.
• A brief mention of cloud-to-cloud integrations was made, but Vikas stated that the trend they've been seeing was more onpremise-to-cloud scenarios, and that typically any organization would want to host their master data internally while still taking advantage of cursory or supplementary cloud services. Otherwise you risk having your data sprinkled across your many public cloud service providers.
• Areas of cloud vendor SLAs, limitations, timeouts, and retries were highlighted.
• Rajesh talked about how cloud service providers are over-simplifying the integration challenges with their cloud services. "Hey, here's an API, just make a simple web service call and you're done!" That's the unfortunate message many execs are hearing from these providers.
• A mention of several new "cloud" adapters down in the pipeline was made.

I got some very good architectural takeaways from this discussion surrounding cloud integration. Here's to hoping that Oracle continues bringing in their experts to these presentations, coupling it with these types of live demos.

Well done.