"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."

Serving as the security backbone for Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Identity Management provides organizations with a suite of best-in-class, standards-based identity management technologies. Combining Oracle's existing solutions with those from Thor Technologies and OctetString, the suite includes industry-leading 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 resulting in reduced administration costs, accelerated deployment cycles and improved overall security for customers.

"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."

Enhanced Provisioning
Provisioning, a critical component of identity management, is among the top security solutions being deployed today. Oracle Xellerate Identity Provisioning (formerly Thor Xellerate) allows organizations to manage user-access rights and privileges throughout the provisioning lifecycle and across diverse IT environments, including platforms, systems, applications and physical assets. Benefits of Oracle Xellerate include increased security, enhanced regulatory compliance, streamlined operations, improved business responsiveness and reduced costs.

Expanded Directory Capabilities
Enterprises are increasingly taking a virtual approach to consolidating user identity information, regardless of where it resides. Virtual directory technology allows for multi-directory consolidation, password integration across directories, directory proxy capabilities—all factors that help accelerate identity management as well as other application deployments. It also delivers increased "hot-pluggable" capabilities for Oracle applications so they can leverage existing enterprise databases and directories for their identity data. 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.

Availability
Oracle Xellerate Identity Provisioning and Oracle Virtual Directory will be available from Oracle by the end of the year. For more information about Oracle Identity Management, visit http://www.oracle.com/identity.

Terms of the transactions are not being disclosed.

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The above is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decision. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle's products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.