#623 Oracle Self-Service Integration SSI

Introduction to SSI

So what is Self-Service Integration - SSI?
SSI is light weight integration service, that works on a simple trigger and action paradigm.

It is targeted at line of business folks - simple to use, yet very effective.

These people use a wide range of cloud apps to accomplish their daily tasks. For example, a marketing specialist may use tools such as Survey Monkey to collect customer responses, he or she may also use Eventbrite to organize, yes, you got it, events. So a simple requirement could be to get those customers who responded to the survey into the company's CRM system.

I.T. could provide such an integration solution, but that takes time etc. So what about enabling the LOB folks to do such integrations themselves?

The fact that most productivity/SaaS apps offer REST APIs make it very easy to integrate with them. SSI uses these under the hood.

So let's start off with a simple example -

In this scenario, I want to integrate EventBrite with my marketing app, Eloqua. The use case is that discussed previously.

So let's look at how SSI helps us -

Recipe is the name used for integrations in SSI.

The product comes with a plethora of Public Recipes, i.e. pre-built integrations.

Let's look at some of them -

Currently we have over 60 such public recipes.

A Simple Example 

But let's create one ourselves, just to show the power of Oracle SSI.

Let's begin with my event -

Now to creating my recipe -












Recipes consist of Triggers and Actions, i.e.

something happening in App A triggers execution.
The execution includes Actions, such as - do something in App B.

I need to authorise SSI usage of my EventBrite account,
if this is the first time I use it.

That's done, now a simple sanity test -

The Trigger, or event occurring,  is someone registering for my event -
I now specify the event - Attendee Registered -

Now to specify which Event -

Now to the Actions - what should happen when someone
registers for The Hare of The Dog Book Launch.

I have already authorised my Eloqua account - similar experience as with EventBrite.

Now to what should happen on the Eloqua side -

The following actions are available -

I select Create Contact -

Now to the input fields for Eloqua -

Let's see which fields are available to us -

So I map accordingly -

I activate the Recipe -

I now reserve tickets in EventBrite

I can run the job now, otherwise SSI polls EventBrite every 15 minutes-

I check the result -

I check in Eloqua -

There's Jimmy!

So what else is there to SSI?

Controls

Actions in SSI also include Controls -

As you can see, we have For Each Loops and IF condition support.

We can, of course, have more than 1 action in a recipe e.g.

If someone registers for an event via EventBrite then put their details into 

Eloqua and Sales Cloud.

Job Execution

Once an SSI recipe is activated, it polls for work every 15 minutes.

So, in respect of the example I created, SSI would poll EventBrite every 15 minutes for 

new attendees. I can also do ad hoc execution from the menu - Run Now

Monitoring

Monitoring is via Job History - 

As you can see, I can select by recipe, completion status and time range.

Here I have 2 jobs - one successful the other failed -

Let's look at the failed job -

The Eloqua error message - email address is not unique - surfaces in SSI.

Perfectly understandable.