Oracle bulks up on identity software

Oracle last week put the final pieces into place for its identity-management suite. Customers say the task now is integrating all the parts.

Oracle, which started piecing together the suite in 2004, last week capped off a string of acquisitions with the purchase of Thor Technologies, which develops provisioning software, and OctetString, a vendor of virtual directory technology. The terms of the deals were not disclosed. Earlier this year, Oracle bought Oblix and its Web-access management and provisioning software, and in 2004 it bought Phaos, which developed identity-federation technology.

Oracle intends to provide customers, who are being driven to identity management by federal regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, with a suite of identity software for such tasks as creating and managing identities, and sharpening access controls. Oracle plans to align its identity platform with its business applications, another area where the company has been growing by acquisition.

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Oracle last week put the final pieces into place for its identity-management suite. Customers say the task now is integrating all the parts.

Oracle, which started piecing together the suite in 2004, last week capped off a string of acquisitions with the purchase of Thor Technologies, which develops provisioning software, and OctetString, a vendor of virtual directory technology. The terms of the deals were not disclosed. Earlier this year, Oracle bought Oblix and its Web-access management and provisioning software, and in 2004 it bought Phaos, which developed identity-federation technology.

Oracle intends to provide customers, who are being driven to identity management by federal regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, with a suite of identity software for such tasks as creating and managing identities, and sharpening access controls. Oracle plans to align its identity platform with its business applications, another area where the company has been growing by acquisition.

Users say they are aware Oracle has a challenge ahead.

"They certainly have all the pieces [for an identity suite], but the ability to effectively integrate is yet to be seen," says a network architect with a Fortune 500 company that runs Oracle, Oblix and Thor technologies. "Their claim is the [Business Process Execution Language] is a key to integration. Another aspect of the task is consolidation of technologies - they have significant duplication."

Oracle says Thor Xcellerate will replace Oblix CoreID provisioning software in the Oracle Identity Management (OIM) suite, but will complement Oracle Internet Directory with OctetString Virtual Directory. In the next eight weeks, Oracle will release, certify and rebrand its newly acquired products.

In the first half of next year, OIM will be upgraded to Version 10.1.3 to include features from the new software, including compliance automation from Thor and OctetString integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware.

With OIM 11, which likely will be released in 2007, Oracle will further deepen the integration.

"Oracle should now be considered a major player in the identity-management market," says Jonathan Penn, an analyst with Forrester Research. "The combined set of products obtained through acquisition form a [Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition]-based portfolio that has a flexible administrative model, flexible role model, flexible data model [and] flexible connector architecture."

Penn warns that Oracle is behind competitors such as IBM and Sun, which have been acquiring identity vendors and integrating suites of products. And last week, Computer Associates shipped CA Identity Manager.

"It will not be adequate for Oracle just to try to leverage its place in the enterprise application market. Nor will it be enough to go after Oracle customers, who are also customers of Sun, IBM, or CA anyway. So there's a lot of work on messaging, marketing and visionary-type identity management ahead for Oracle," Penn says.

In parallel, Oracle will align the identity platform with its applications platform.