Oracle on Monday said it plans to acquire AmberPoint, a maker of service-oriented architecture management software, and fold the company's products into Oracle's Fusion middleware.

AmberPoint technology helps IT organizations diagnose and fix problems with application performance and business transactions within an SOA environment in which multiple applications need to work together. Such applications could be used, for example, in insurance claim processing or account provisioning.

Oracle plans to use AmberPoint products in extending the capabilities of Oracle SOA Suite, SOA Governance, and Enterprise Manager software. AmberPoint technology will help fix software problems before they impact a business, Oracle said.

"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," Thomas Kurian, executive VP of Oracle product development, said in a statement.

Oracle expects to complete the acquisition in the first half of this year. Financial details were not disclosed.

An SOA comprises business software organized in a granular fashion, so that common functions can be used interchangeably by different departments internally and by external business partners as well. The architecture, which uses Web services standards in exposing applications over an Internet protocol network, is a more flexible alternative to building monolithic applications.

Web services management products such as AmberPoint use agents that act as policy enforcement points. Other vendors offering such products include Actional, Hewlett-Packard, and SOA Software.

AmberPoint will be the latest in a string of acquisitions by Oracle. The most recent major purchase was the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which Oracle completed in January.