Acquisition of the Week update from April 2005

Okay, it's really the acquisition of last week, but I was on vacation last week. Everyone's already chimed in on what this means and why Oracle acquired Oblix, but what it really means is that there are very few pure play vendors left in the identity management space. IBM purchased Access360 and Sun acquired Waveset in the last two years and while both products were more focused on provisioning both provided the basics for identity management and, indeed, worked well with the recently CA acquired Netegrity SiteMinder product line. That leaves RSA Security as one of the few focused identity management and access control vendors in the market. What's interesting about the Oblix acquisition is that it isn't all about identity management. Last year Oblix acquired Confluent for its Web Services (XML and SOAP) security and management products, which was an excellent complement to its ID management line. This is more than just an ID management play, because Oracle will now join in the fray of the Web Services Management arena, a rather large market at the moment filled with start-ups and relatively small companies like AmberPoint and Actional.This gives Oracle a head start in the SOA Infrastructure Management rush that's sure to come, and puts it in a good position to instrument its suite of applications for such management, which could be a boon over competing applications that today require third-party agents for such deep introspective management.