"It's good for Oracle because it gives them more of a heterogeneous offering'' capable of working in non-Oracle environments, said Phil Shacter, an analyst at Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group Inc. But Oracle will have a lot of work to do to integrate all of the components into a single identity management stack, Shacter said.

Other major vendors such as BMC Software Inc., Computer Associates International Inc., IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. having all been making similar moves in the identity management market in the past two to three years. But it's taking a lot of time and effort for those companies to integrate their products into cohesive offerings, Shacter said.

For instance, BMC -- with its purchases of OpenNetwork Technologies Inc. and Calendra -- and CA, with its purchase earlier this year of Netegrity Inc., are only now getting to the point where they have a common interface between their identity management products, Shacter said. Oracle will face similar challenge.

Chris Zannetos, CEO of Framingham, Mass.-based Courion Corp., one of the few pure-play ID management vendors left in the market, said the approach being taken by major vendors would appeal only to the largest corporations with both the resources and the time to spend on integration.

Most of the others investing in identity management products are looking for quicker returns on their investments and are likely to stick with vendors who can help them achieve that, he said.