Oracle acquires AmberPoint

Aafter its $7.4-billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems following European anti-trust regulators' approval last month (See: Oracle finally gets the EC nod for Sun Microsystems acquisition),Oracle yesterday announced its plans to acquire service-oriented architecture (SOA) management software provider AmberPoint for an undisclosed sum.

AmberPoint's solutions help organisations diagnose and resolve issues in application performance and business transactions, such as insurance claims processing or account provisioning where multiple applications need to work together.

AmberPoint's SOA management products would add to Oracle Fusion Middleware's industry-leading SOA capabilities including Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle SOA Governance and Oracle Enterprise Manager accelerating the resolution of application performance and business transactions issues before the business is impacted.

Thomas Kurian, Oracle's executive vice president, product development, said in a statement, ''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.''

The acquisition also enables Oracel make its existing comprehensive Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA offering more extensive and helps improve performance and reduce IT costs through end-to-end SOA management and business transaction management solutions.

The transaction is expected to close the first half of this year.

AmberPoint was founded in 2001 with significant venture backing from Norwest and Sutter Hill become a eading provider of visibility, management and security software for distributed applications.

AmberPoint leads the market in the number of software licenses, paid customers and customers in production.