News

Oracle Beefs Up SOA with AmberPoint Deal

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• February 8, 2010

Oracle today said it has agreed to acquire AmberPoint, a supplier of software for managing service-oriented architectures (SOA), for an undisclosed sum.

Both AmberPoint and SOA Software are regarded as the leading providers of software that allows IT organizations to troubleshoot and improve the performance of applications that are tied together in SOA-type architectures. The acquisition of AmberPoint likely will fill a key hole in Oracle's Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager suites.

"AmberPoint provides business transaction visibility that is lacking outside the Oracle umbrella," said Ovum analyst Tony Baer. "Enterprise Manager has very good visibility to Oracle Applications and Fusion middleware but it's not well set up for dealing with anything that's outside Oracle. This [acquisition] also firms up their SOA governance story."

Baer said he was surprised that AmberPoint wasn't acquired sooner. "They had been flirting with Microsoft and Oracle for some time," he said.

Both AmberPoint and SOA Software extended their collaborations on SOA governance in 2008 with Microsoft, as reported here. The likely outcome is that Microsoft will align itself more closely with SOA Software, Baer said.

"I would imagine Microsoft will veer closer to them," he said. "If Microsoft were looking to do an acquisition, they [SOA Software] would be a likely candidate."