What is Oracle Integration Cloud Service? What are the various type of integration flows available in OIC?

 

What is OIC?

 

OIC stands for Oracle Integration Cloud services, it comes as part of the PaaS offering.  It was launched in 2015 by oracle and during that time it was used to get called Integration Cloud services (ICS), but with continuous improvements in  ICS, it is now evolved and referred to as  OIC (Oracle Integration Cloud) services.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service (OIC) is nothing but a cloud-based integration application designed to perform integrations between cloud-based applications – but also has the capability, to perform integrations with on-premises applications.

Through OIC you can accelerate the whole integration development process, as it comes with predefined inbuilt connectors like Oracle EBS On-Prem, SalesForce Cloud, Oracle SaaS Cloud, MS office   etc. which will let you connect to any of the on-premise or cloud applications, send data between them, automate business processes, and create models to gain insight into how our business is doing.

 

In a nutshell, You can bring data and applications together across on-premise and cloud systems: cloud to cloud, cloud to on-premises (ground), and on-premises to on-premises (ground to ground).    

 

Different Component of Oracle Integration Cloud Services

 

Integration à This component is where we can build REST or SOAP services. Connecting to different systems  (source/target) through a prebuilt connector and monitoring them.

PCS -- > Process Cloud services, in this we build workflows for the integrations. Like approval should go to a certain employee hierarchy.

VBCS à Visual Builder Cloud Services it’s a visual component based on the Oracle jet framework. Through this platform web and mobile applications can be developed.

B2B à This component was introduced recently, Electronic exchange of Busines documents such as EDI, Purchase orders can be handled and automated through this Component.  

 

Architecture of Oracle Integration Cloud Services

 

 

 

Type of Integration flows in OIC

 

Real-time app-driven integration flows: These integrations are API endpoints exposed on OIC (REST/SOAP) and callable by external systems where we implement error handling using scopes.

 

Scheduled integration flows: This type of integration is as similar as CRON jobs. OIC gives us the ability to define a schedule as to when the integration flow will automatically be triggered and perform its duties. Typically, these flows may poll an external API or an SFTP server on a regular basis and then perform the logic of the integration flow dictated by the business challenge. The introduction of a built-in SFTP server to OIC has been a game-changer for us and is very commonly used on our OIC implementations. This could simply be a scheduled flow that includes reading a file from an SFTP location on a regular interval and writing the error log & execution log once the integration run is completed.

 

Real-time/Scheduled queue-based integrations: We’ve also implemented stateful integration flows where the state (success/fail) of each message along with its contents is kept in an external location for a certain amount of time leveraging Oracle Database Cloud Service and JMS queues in conjunction with OIC successfully for our customers.