New additions to the Oracle Cloud Platform were introduced in June by Oracle executive chairman of the board and CTO Larry Ellison.
A critical piece of the updated suite, according to Amit Zavery, senior vice president of Cloud Platform at Oracle, is the Oracle Integration Cloud Service, which aims to simplify integration between cloud and on-premises Oracle and third-party applications.
The Oracle Cloud Platform is a suite of services targeted at helping developers, IT professionals, business users and analysts to build, extend, and integrate cloud applications.
Oracle’s new Integration Cloud Service is comprised of prebuilt integrations that can be used as-is or customized for specific business requirements.
The Integration Cloud Service is necessary to deal with the reality that Oracle customers are grappling with today, said Zavery. While many of them are moving to the cloud, given the size of their IT investments, however, they can’t be expected to make that transition immediately. Over the next few years, they will be looking at where they will need to deploy cloud-based applications and where they will continue using on-premise for some time, and ultimately, the transition will be dependent on their requirements, he said.
Integration has become broad
“Integration has become quite broad,” said Zavery. Initially, it used to be on-premise to on-premise, connecting applications for an end-to-end business flow, but now, more companies are using SaaS applications, and on top of that, they have mobile and IoT applications which is adding complexity to the integration picture.
In addition, many Oracle customers actually use tens of SaaS applications, across departmental users and fragmented business functions. Oracle has seen customers that have 20, 30, or 40 SaaS applications but until they are asked to count them they are not fully aware of it. “And, it is a very distributed deployment as well, on-premise, with cloud, and some edge-based devices, so the hybrid part becomes very critical to continue the business today, in addition to the ability to incorporate a lot of the newer requirements which business have, without having to re-platform or do a new implementation of integration technology every time something new comes up,” said Zavery.
Subscription-based, standards-based
The Integration Cloud Service is completely hosted and run by Oracle in the public cloud and it is subscription-based. “The full engine and all the modeling and endpoint integration is done in the cloud so you don’t need anything but a browser to use it,” Zavery added. Moreover, there is no need for coding, and the functionality is all drag and drop with prepackaged content for a range of applications, including Oracle SaaS applications and third-party SaaS applications.
An additional aspect of the Oracle Integration Cloud Service is that it provides seamless transportability between on-premise and cloud so users can build an application in the cloud and move the artifact and the code to on-premise, or continue to run production systems in the cloud. “This allows customers the ability to build very quickly and decide later on how they want to deploy,” said Zavery. “Everything we do is standards-based and we are making sure with all of our cloud offerings that they are compatible with what customers are running on-premise as well.”
For more information, go to http://cloud.oracle.com/integration.