New York-based Thor Technologies sells a range of application provisioning products that help companies automate the administration of user access rights to applications based on policies. Schaumburg, Ill.-based Octet String is a vendor of virtual directory software designed to allow applications and policy servers to access diverse identity stores.

The purchases will allow Oracle to flesh out its identity management portfolio and will give users a complete suite of products for managing identities in their enterprises, said Hasan Rizvi, vice president of identity management and security products at Oracle. Wednesday's announcement follows Oracle's purchase in April of Oblix Inc. for an undisclosed sum. That purchase gave Oracle access to a range of tools supporting capabilities such as single sign-on and federated identity management.

"In the six to nine months that we have been in the identity management market, we have talked to a lot of our customers and heard consistently from them about compliance needs driving their interest" in ID management products, Rizvi said. The purchase of Thor will allow Oracle to give those customers a variety of tools for automating the administration of user access rights and privileges across diverse application and system environments.

"User-provisioning systems are a key element of managing identity data in terms of being able to control access" to applications, Rizvi said.

The Octect String purchase, meanwhile, is designed to give users a tool that allows them to consolidate identity information from multiple locations into a single consolidated virtual directory. The goal is to help companies reduce the complexity of connecting applications to multiple sources of identity information, he said.