Any doubts as to CA's or Oracle's commitment to identity were dismissed in recent weeks, however, in the wake of major announcements that should bring both companies back to the forefront of the market.

The boldest move came from Oracle, which acquired two new identity-related companies (infoworld.com/3606). With the purchase of Thor Technologies, Oracle gains strong cross-platform user provisioning capabilities; OctetString brings technology that can ease integration of disparate enterprise directories. But it remains to be seen how long it takes Oracle to combine these components into a unified offering.

CA announced that it expects to complete integration of Netegrity IdentityMinder with its own eTrust Admin provisioning product by year's end -- more than a year after the Netegrity acquisition. The new product will be called CA Identity Manager and will be the first of several combined Netegrity/eTrust offerings the company has planned for early 2006.