SOA Magazine IV 01.2015

As time went by, a combination of market pressure and industry trends, caused Oracle to
include in the 10g release of SOA Suite (year 2007) something called: Oracle Enterprise Service
Bus (OESB). Then Oracle could finally say: we do have as part of our stack an Enterprise Service
Bus.
As fancy as it sounded, this former version of Oracle’s ESB was somehow limited and never
really qualified as a best-of-breed product. Furthermore, it never boded well with architects,
developers and administrators who found it a tad complicated and unfriendly.
So, it seems like we’ve identified a first milestone in this BPEL vs OSB discussion. An early
version of the SOA Suite we’ve come to know (10g), which included:
An already robust and highly-liked product based on an up and coming industry
standard (BPEL)
A below average ESB as an optional component of the suite
At the time, Oracle ESB (OESB) wound up not being heavily used in most integration projects
outside of AIA implementations. For the time being and the state of industry requirements,
BPEL could exist and function mostly by its own.
Then in 2008, Oracle buys BEA Systems, and with this acquisition we come into a second
relevant milestone: The release of Oracle SOA Suite 11g in mid-2009. This new and revamped
stack introduced some very relevant changes:
1. Oracle WebLogic Server as the runtime platform for all of the tools included in the Suite.
2. Oracle Service Bus (based on the former BEA AquaLogic Service Bus) comes along, as a
true ESB capable of positioning itself as one of the market-leading players.
3. 10g’s ESB (OESB), is rebranded as “Mediator” and stays as an optional component of the
Suite.
This proved to be a great move by Oracle, and from the technology/architecture standpoint it
gave to the components its specific weight. Now the Enterprise Service Bus
standards/capabilities were very well identified inside Oracle Service Bus. But if your SOA
initiative included orchestration, business activity monitoring, business rules, the Oracle SOA
Suite with the rest of the components, was an excellent option.
With this new stack, OSB could even be licensed on its own for clients that wanted to have the
ESB alone as a cornerstone for their SOA implementation, though the most usual scenario is for
the customers to have both the SOA Suite and the OSB as part of a multifaceted and well
complimented SOA Toolkit.
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