Oracle has announced the acquisition of Bridgestream, a provider of enterprise role management software.

The database giant intends to add Bridgestream's role discovery, definition and management capabilities to its Identity and Access Management Suite, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

"With the acquisition of Bridgestream, Oracle can help organisations streamline compliance-related tasks and automate role management," said Hasan Rizvi, vice president for identity management and security products at Oracle.

Oracle claims that enterprise role management has emerged as a key component of identity management deployments.

The firm argues that the increased focus on compliance regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, has created a need for organisations to control access to sensitive systems more strictly and to monitor access privileges regularly.

Bridgestream's SmartRoles and Discoverer products are designed to address these issues by enabling role-based access control where privileges are grouped by business roles, managing access and improving compliance.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.