Oracle SaaS has a significant market presence, and Oracle ABCS is designed to allow extensibility
to Oracle SaaS applications via REST service APIs. This should provide a strong channel for
hpaPaaS adoption.
Oracle has a multitude of complementary xPaaS capabilities accessible from any of its high-
productivity tooling. For high-productivity use, there is the Oracle Process Cloud (BPM, with
decision modelling support) and its conversational bot builder. Other high-control services
accessible via REST (with suitable guidance) include integration, business analytics, IoT, in-
memory data grid, and database. This could reinforce RAD styles of development in enterprises in
order to boost overall IT productivity and justify continued investment in the Oracle stack. A
higher-than-average proportion of the Oracle reference customers surveyed by Gartner for this
Magic Quadrant consider integration to be a strength.
Few enterprise software vendors offer a comprehensive set of software services, with full cloud
coverage (from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS) plus hybrid support (public, private cloud and on-premises).
Oracle is one, and such coverage is likely to prove attractive to mainstream enterprises gradually
moving to cloud computing. It is not surprising that half the Oracle ABCS reference customers we
surveyed selected it because of Oracle's preferred-vendor status in their organizations.
CAUTIONS
Although ideal for create, read, update, delete (CRUD)-type applications, Oracle ABCS itself does
not include any means of orchestrating processes. Oracle customers need to purchase Oracle
Process Cloud for such capabilities. Oracle customers must choose from multiple hpaPaaS styles
(ABCS for SOA, Process Cloud for BPM, or APEX for database extensions), and other than the
possibility of accessing shared data services, there is as yet little commonality or portability
between these offerings.
Oracle ABCS and its underlying JET framework was released in early 2016, and is clearly still
under development. Support for the scripting of business logic was added while this Gartner
research was being written. The majority of the Oracle reference customers surveyed had fewer
than 10 developers using the tool, and more than one-third had deployed only a single application.
One-quarter of the respondents declared technical support and documentation to be only fair or
worse — indicators of an early stage in a product's life cycle.
Surveyed Oracle reference customers gave variable feedback about the successful use of ABCS at
this stage. "Ease of use" is considered to be below average compared with other vendors in the
Magic Quadrant. The improvement most requested by a high proportion of Oracle's reference
customers (higher than average compared to other vendors) was in "ease of deployment."
A common concern from hpaPaaS users has been value for money: more than 40% of Oracle's
surveyed reference customers judged this as only fair, or worse. Oracle's reputation in contract
negotiation may make this perception difficult to change.
OutSystems
OutSystems (http://www.outsystems.com/) offers a RAD hpaPaaS solution that focuses on
accelerating the "time to solution" of enterprise apps. It is one of the better-known and more-
established providers in the market today. The OutSystems platform uses an indirectly executed