Oracle Plans ClearApp Acquisition, Strengthens SOA Management Portfolio

Oracle on Tuesday announced its plans to acquire ClearApp (News - Alert), a California-based company that develops software for managing the performance of composite applications in service oriented architecture (SOA).

 

The ClearApp deal is Oracle’s (News - Alert) latest move in its continued effort to create a suite of application management tools by assimilating technologies from different vendors.

 

Service oriented architecture unifies business processes by organizing large applications as an ad hoc collection of smaller modules called services. These applications can be used by different people within and outside a company. New applications can be built from a mix of services from the global pool to provide greater flexibility and uniformity to the system.

 

Today’s SOA environments involve a number of complex processes that can make it hard to nail down the source of performance problems or pinpoint the effect of changes made to a given component, Oracle said.

 

ClearApp's software, in conjunction with Oracle’s Enterprise Manager platform, automatically discovers application components and their dependencies at runtime and monitors performance. ClearApp solution addresses the difficult task of managing composite applications built on SOA platforms by providing visibility of business services across all related application components. ClearApp also supports many popular platforms, including IBM (News - Alert) WebSphere.

 

According to Oracle, ClearApp products and Oracle Enterprise Manager are expected to provide customers with a comprehensive application management solution providing enhanced service levels, reduced system downtime and improved return on SOA investments.

 

“As customers deploy more SOA-based applications, the task of effectively managing them becomes paramount,” said Leng Leng Tan, vice president at Oracle’s applications and systems management division, in a statement. “Oracle is focused on delivering the best solutions for managing such complex application environments by delivering solutions for end-user experience management, business services and application performance management, as well as application testing and quality management.”

 

Leng Tan further said, the addition of ClearApp's technology to Oracle Enterprise Manager product family gives Oracle’s customers continuous and uninterrupted top-down views of their business services and applications, helping them maximize service availability while reducing IT operations costs.

 

The ClearApp acquisition is Oracle’s third such deal with application management software vendors within the past year. Earlier this year, Oracle bought an Indian firm, Auptyma. Since then, Auptyma’s flagship Java Application Monitor has been renamed Oracle Application Diagnostics for Java and is available as part of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware Management Packs.

 

In a similar deal last December, Oracle bought Dutch firm Moniforce, which provides two software solutions — WebStress and WebProbe — that enable users to monitor the performance and availability of their Web applications.

 

Leng Tan, in a letter to Oracle customers, said software from ClearApp, Moniforce and Auptyma would work with Oracle Enterprise Manager to better manage customers' SOA investments.

 

According to Oracle, the deal is expected to close later this year. Financial terms were not disclosed.