Oracle Snaps Up SOA Specialist AmberPoint

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Oracle on Monday added another key piece to its Fusion middleware suite, acquiring AmberPoint, a privately held maker of service-oriented architecture (SOA) management applications.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

AmberPoint, based in Oakland, Calif., develops software used by enterprise customers to diagnose and resolve issues in application performance and business transactions where multiple applications need to work together, such as insurance claims processing or account provisioning.

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) officials said the newly acquired SOA management apps will be folded into Oracle’s SOA Suite, Oracle SOA Governance and Oracle Enterprise Manager suites, to “accelerate the resolution of application performance and business transactions issues before a customer’s business is impacted.”

“AmberPoint and Oracle share a vision of providing customers with comprehensive SOA management capabilities that support modern IT environments and are also complete, open, and integrated,” Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s executive vice president for 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,” he added.

The AmberPoint purchase is Oracle’s 53rd acquisition since 2005, a breakneck pace that has allowed Oracle to round out its product portfolio from the database layer all the way up through the software stack and now includes servers and chipsets garnered from its blockbuster acquisitions of Sun Microsystemsearlier this year.

In its most recent quarter, Oracleeasily hurdled analysts’ estimates, posting a profit of $2 billion, or $0.39 a share, excluding special charges, on sales of $5.9 billion.

Oracle said it expects the AmberPoint deal to close sometime in the first half of this year.

Privately held AmberPoint received funding from a variety of investors including Crosslink Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and, most interestingly, SAP Ventures, the investing arm of its archnemesis SAP.

Oracle shares trimmed $0.37, or 2 percent, in Monday afternoon trading. The stock peaked at $25.64 a share in January after falling to a 12-month low of $13.80 in March.

Twenty-five of the 34 analysts tracking the stock rate it either a “buy” or “strong buy.”

Larry Barrett is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.