I thought cloud computing would do away with acronym-laden technologies such as service-oriented architecture (SOA). Can’t you just sign up for applications run in a public cloud?
You can, but what happens when you want to integrate that shiny new cloud app with your existing applications and data? That integration has its own term—hybrid cloud—and for most enterprises, it’s the new norm. More than 65% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016, according to International Data Corporation.
Meanwhile, everyone from marketing to HR to product development is screaming for better information flow between departments, and they don’t care where the apps reside. That also requires smooth integration of cloud and legacy applications and data, which, as you will see, leads us back to SOA.
These hybrid scenarios are complex, involving a mix of on-premises and cloud applications, stationary and mobile applications, in B2B and B2C environments. Enterprise IT needs to deploy a framework that simplifies and speeds up integration. Gone are the days when the business will wait six months for an integration project to grind to completion.
“Companies must find ways of integrating data at speed across multiple environments, and that requires hybrid integration environments that reduce rather than add complexity,” says Amit Zavery, Oracle senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Platform.
That’s the thinking behind Oracle’s recent announcement of Oracle SOA Cloud Service and Oracle API Manager Cloud Service, two new services designed to help companies integrate mixed cloud and on-premises environments. The two services join Oracle Integration Cloud Service in Oracle's integration cloud platform portfolio, a sector that will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 40% over the next four years, Ovum forecasts, reaching $940 million by the end of 2019.
With Oracle SOA Suite as its foundation, Oracle SOA Cloud Service integration platform is designed to simplify and centralize integration of hybrid environments. It provides easy provisioning, simplified management, automated upgrades, and the ability to easily scale out. Oracle API Manager Cloud Service is the management side of the tandem.
“Oracle SOA Cloud Service allows you to create APIs for everything from legacy applications to cloud services, but companies then want to make those APIs discoverable and share them securely,” Zavery says. “API Manager allows you to do that by managing the lifecycle of APIs.”
Hybrid Integration Gets Easier
This is where hybrid integration platforms really shine. “Once the platform is configured, it’s very easy to add more data services, or even API services from third-party providers,” he says. “The hybrid part becomes much, much easier to do.”
Customers who are currently using Oracle’s SOA Suite on premises can leverage their existing investments, immediately create cloud-based instances, and can view both on-premises and cloud implementations through one central interface.
As application complexity grows, that ability to streamline integration across environments becomes invaluable. Zavery gives the example of an interactive marketing experience that reaches across multiple channels, interfaces, and devices.
“You probably need to draw data from 20 or so different applications and distribute that data across all of those environments,” he says. “In order to look at the customer interactions and market to them in real time, you’ll need to quickly change flows and connections based on what you want to target. For that, you really need an integration platform.”
Find more on Oracle.com: