Oracle on Monday said it plans to acquire AmberPoint, a maker of
service-oriented architecture management software, and fold the
company's products into Oracle's Fusion middleware. AmberPoint
technology helps IT organizations diagnose and fix problems with
application performance and business transactions within an SOA
environment in which multiple applications need to work together.
Such applications could be used, for example, in insurance claim
processing or account provisioning.
Oracle plans to use AmberPoint products in extending the
capabilities of Oracle SOA Suite, SOA Governance, and Enterprise
Manager software. AmberPoint technology will help fix software
problems before they impact a business, Oracle said. "We expect the
addition of AmberPoint's products to Oracle Fusion
Middleware SOA Suite will provide stronger end-to-end governance
that
allows customers to manage the entire lifecycle of SOA-based
solutions,
providing visibility and management across heterogeneous
environments,"
Thomas Kurian, executive VP of Oracle product development, said in
a
statement.
Oracle expects to complete the acquisition in the first half of
this year. Financial details were not disclosed.
An SOA comprises business software organized in a granular fashion,
so that common functions can be used interchangeably by different
departments internally and by external business partners as well.
The architecture, which uses Web services standards in exposing
applications over an Internet protocol network, is a more flexible
alternative to building monolithic applications.
Web services management products such as AmberPoint use agents that
act as policy enforcement points. Other vendors offering such
products include Actional, Hewlett-Packard, and SOA Software.
AmberPoint will be the latest in a string of acquisitions by
Oracle. The most recent major purchase was the acquisition of Sun
Microsystems, which Oracle completed in January.