Oracle moved to shore up its IT security portfolio on Wednesday with two corporate acquisitions. The database giant said the purchase of Thor Technologies, a provider of cross-platform provisioning solutions and OctetString, a developers of virtual directory software, aimed to significantly strengthen its portfolio of identity and access management products.
"Oracle is investing heavily in rapidly growing our heterogeneous, identity management product portfolio due to its criticality to our customers," said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware.
"With the acquisition of Thor Technologies and OctetString, Oracle is poised to deliver the industry's strongest and most robust suite of standards-based identity management technologies," said Kurian.
Oracle's existing solutions with those from Thor Technologies and OctetString will be integrated into the Oracle Identity Management suite, which the firm describes as the security backbone for its Fusion Middleware. Oracle Xellerate Identity Provisioning (formerly Thor Xellerate) is designed to allow organizations to manage user-access rights and privileges throughout the provisioning lifecycle and across diverse IT environments, including platforms, systems, applications and physical assets. Oracle Virtual Directory (formerly OctetString Virtual Directory Engine) enables organizations to connect applications to multiple sources of user identities within the enterprise quickly and easily.
The Oracle Identity Management suite includes offerings for access control, identity administration, identity federation, user provisioning, directory services and web services management. As part of Oracle's identity-management strategy, these incremental solutions will, over time, be integrated into the company's application infrastructure.
"Oracle's acquisition of Thor and OctetString is a good move," said Mike Neuenschwander, vice president and research director, Burton Group.
"These acquisitions, coupled with Oracle's unique application top down approach to Identity Management, will send ripples through the industry.
Financial terms of the transactions were not disclosed.
