Oracle Integration Cloud is rich in adaptors for technology and major SaaS services both Oracle (E.g., HCM, ERP, CX) and non Oracle (e.g., Salesforce, ServiceNow). But the more observant may have noticed a new addition to the list of Oracle industry (vertical) adaptors joining the Utilities vertical is a new adaptor for Hospitality.
OPERA, and it’s integration service OHIP have been developing to bring first of all its 3000+ APIs upto date as RESTFUL and self service enabled as the OPERA product becomes a SaaS delivered solution. Not to mention provide a good developer experience with Apiary and resources such as Postman collections (more about this here).
The latest step (from 21.4.2) has been to further the simplify the development process through the use of low code integration OIC provides. You can read some initial blogs about it here, and I’m sure there will be more to come.
Today the Adaptor just supports the Property Management System (PMS) that is for us uninitiated the system element handling the hotels core operations such as rooms, housekeeping and associated tasks – the heart of a hotel based business. Areas such as marketing, cruise ships, point of sale (PoS) etc fall out side of PMS and are not covered today.
Why OHIP and OIC
OHIP and OIC really comes into its own because it is very easy to wire the hotel management solution to common services such as ERP and HCM functions.
For example if you’re operating a group of hotels, then each hotel will use an OPERA instance, but the group may well make use of ERP Cloud for the overall accounting, taking the costs etc identified in the hotel operations via OPERA and then those figures are put into the group ERP to provide the overall financial controls and picture.
Adaptor Foundations
The OIC Adaptor builds on top of the OHIP APIs, as a result the same restrictions on invocations, security needs exist as going to the native API. Like all OIC integration development we need to establish a connection definition which needs the URL of you OHIP instance, plus the same credentials you would use for a rest connection.
Adaptor Features
The connection form is very straight forward as it simplifies the options for connecting to OHIP. It also includes the ability to associate the connection with an execution agent.
The Adaptor supports both triggers (source) and invokers (targets). Today the features of adaptor configuration address aspects of managing several of the header attributes such as the key. As a result the adaptor appears a lot like a REST service.
As the Adaptor setup uses the underlying REST APIs provided by OHIP, as a result it is unsurprising that the adaptor configuration looks a lot like the standard REST adaptor. Currently the adaptor doesn’t have the predefined data structures provided by OHIP but this feature is coming. In the interim, it is necessary to either upload a JSON schema or add an example inline (probably the easiest option).
We can see the use of the OHIP adaptor in the following example integration:
Mapping
Obviously the mapping process remains the the same. In a recent blog (here) the question of handling dates in OHIP was raised, as it wasn’t entirely clear whether dates and date times being represented as in US or European formats (i.e. month-day-year or day-month-year). We have had it confirmed that the format is day-month-year. Useful to know when handling dates in a mapping.
Integrating two common products such as OPERA and ERP Cloud means that the recommendation engine Making the integration process very easy.
Integration flow with OHIP adaptors involved
Conclusion
With features still to come, you have a solid start which to making the work of integrating Oracle Hospitality not just with other Oracle products but a great many others as easy and streamlined as possible,
If you would like to see and know more then consider checking the online event Connecting Opera Cloud to the World – PaaS Partner Community Webcast (or the recording if you miss the live event).
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