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The OIC ecosystem – Integration & OCI Services – an Overview by Niall Commiskey

Blog: PaaS Community

Customers buy solutions not products – OIC is the solution for connecting your apps, extending your apps, gaining business insight into your business processes, creating net new web and native mobile apps on top of your app apis. But what if OIC is not enough for some use cases? Then remember OIC is a cloud native OCI service, one of many others – these "others" can be easily leveraged from OIC to provide the business solutions customers require.

The above graphic shows the OIC capabilities and the OCI Services discussed in this post. Seems a lot doesn’t it? Especially when you consider that most customers will start of with a simpler set of requirements. But let’s start with our EBS customer, who is transitioning to Fusion ERP. Yes, the graphic below is from me – apologies for it’s basic nature – but I like keeping things simple.

The above details the basic requirements from a customer perspective. Note the rest of the customer’s ecosystem is not shown here. There will probably be many other COTS and custom applications involved e.g. PeopleSoft, Siebel etc.

This post will not discuss what the customer plans to do with such – e.g. leave PSFT on-premise or maybe run it on IaaS or even transition to Fusion HCM. I also do not discuss the customer’s current on-premise integration architecture. Maybe she is using SOA Suite and will need to run many of those integrations for the near future. In other words, the transitioning from EBS to Fusion ERP means the customer has 2 ERPs for a certain length of time; the same goes for integration solutions. There is bi-directional connectivity between OIC and SOA Suite, which makes this transition easier. So now, after all of those disclaimers, let’s start…

Data Integration may be interesting for the initial seeding of EBS data in Fusion ERP. It may also be useful for high volume database replication use cases – real time data lakes / operational reporting – look at Oracle GoldenGate here. Think of data integration for large amounts of data at rest that need moving somewhere (bulk data movement / preparation) i.e. after the business processes, that put the data there, have ended. Application integration is more focused on integrating (near) real time data between the apps in your ecosystem.

I have already alluded to the fact that Application Integration is a must for ensuring communication between your ERP and its ecosystem – consider all your stovepipe apps and the horizontal business processes that traverse them.

For example, that ecosystem will also contain your CRM, where you manage your customer relationship – contacts, opportunities etc. Application Integration is there to help keep those contacts in sync as well as implement the orchestration required for your Opportunity to Order business process, amongst a multitude of other integration use cases.

You are extremely happy with your ERP of choice, and sure why wouldn’t you be? But what about that extra approval workflow that is specific to your organization? This is where App Extensions come into play. You need the ability to easily create such human centric workflows that provide that extra functionality you need. Those supplementary workflows also need to be embedded in your ERP, so your ERP end users have a streamlined experience. Read the complete article here.

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