Oracle Starts Melding Security, ID Management Offerings

Oracle Identity Management 10g Release 3, incorporating Oblix identify management, Thor Technologies provisioning tools and OctetString's virtual directory, should be available around May, or toward the end of Oracle's fiscal year, said Amit Jasuja, vice president of Identity Management Product Development for the Redwood Shores, Calif., database giant. Oracle will discuss its plans at next week's RSA Conference.

"With this release we're updating all of the products in a number of ways and there is also a fair amount of integration so they all work together, share some common technologies," Jasuja told CRN Wednesday.

Oracle bought Oblix in March 2005 and made that a core piece of the current Identity management release available since September. It bought Thor and Octet in November.

The new offering is important for partners because "security is so high on everyone's priority list now," said Ron Zapar, president of Re-quest, a Chicago-area Oracle partner.

That may be truer now than ever since Oracle has seen its "unbreakable" database under siege of late.

Derek Small, president of Nulli Secundus, a Calgary-based Oracle partner agreed.

"There was some concern that these [acquired] offerings would remain siloed," Small said. "When they're integrated we can focus on the solution, not on lower-level integration," he noted.

"We're unique because we've done PeopleSoft and Oblix integration for seven years. We kind of saw that opportunity before Oracle did," Small joked. Oracle completed its buyout of PeopleSoft early last year, and of the much smaller Oblix months later.

Jasuja said the company also has done work on the compliance side, supporting new customization by partners that do value-added services. The product will support reporting for different industries and regulation, he noted. "We'll deliver interesting and powerful capabilities for companies to track historical privileges," he said.

The software would be able to track what data a given user had access to on any given day, for example.