Foreword

As the digital age embraces each of us, our businesses and the world around us, the importance of Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Integration, and API Management and is higher than ever before. Today, every business is not only expected to lead but also be able to pivot and flex to ride over disruptions or even disrupt age old industries themselves-be it banking, public sector, hospitality, music or any other, even the 300 year old taxi industry. Today businesses expect their IT to be agile and rapid enough to enable them to compete and lead in an environment where the next technology-led disruption is always just around the corner.

Enterprises, large, and small, are seeing rapid uptake of best of breed SaaS applications, often led not by the CIO or IT, but by the Line of Business (LOB) such as the HR manager, the sales VP or the marketing officer. SaaS bring unprecedented advantages of the cloud with rapid deployments, ease of use and huge savings in time and money. While SaaS undoubtedly brings these benefits, it doesn't take long for the LOB to realize the importance of their SaaS applications integrating with each other, with existing on-premises applications and with business processes across the enterprise – without this SaaS is nothing but silos as a service. This is where the rapid development and elevated user experience of the leading Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)-Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) comes in.

In this book, Phil Wilkins and Robert van Mölken, take us through an exciting and insightful journey of how Oracle ICS solves exactly this crucial and urgent need that businesses face today – an iPaaS solution that complements your SaaS and on-premises application landscape allowing SaaS business users to rapidly build cloud and hybrid integrations, while allowing IT to have visibility of these integrations at design time and runtime, across the enterprise.

Phil and Robert, bring years of rich experience solving integration problems for market leading businesses across the globe. Through this book, they not only share their expertise of Oracle ICS through in-depth information on leveraging the service but also take us through an exciting journey weaving through various aspects of rapidly building cloud and on-premises integrations-simple as well as complex, multi-step orchestrations – leveraging tens of out of the box connectivity adapters and monitoring capabilities that Oracle ICS brings, for the SaaS user as well as IT. Phil and Robert, have not only shared when and how to use Oracle ICS for your business but have also articulated how to effectively solve modern business integration problems.

Your drive and expertise will always have the biggest impact on your IT and business, but I hope the knowledge you gain from this book of Oracle ICS enables you further to build the technical, architectural, and integration capabilities your business critically needs today, whether in the cloud, on-premises or both, to innovate and to future proof your business and IT.

Vikas Anand

Vice President, Product Management, Oracle Integration Platform Oracle Corporation