Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.x consists of three components—Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (OESB), and Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM). Additionally, it also includes Oracle Service Bus (OSB), Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and the Rules Engine.

Oracle built an Enterprise Service Bus (OESB) as the plumbing layer to frontend the BPEL-based business processes. The Service Bus is used as the mediator layer to transform messages in different formats to common canonical formats, and route to the backend BPEL processes, or other services. It is a step up from the point-to-point Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) methodology that involves frequent changes at both ends of the integration.

Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.x is a single installable, and is extremely easy to install and configure with Oracle JDeveloper. As the common IDE to develop BPEL-based business processes, and OESB-based services it provides a great platform for developers and architects to implement SOA projects.