Oracle Entitlements Server 10g R3, based on BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security, externalizes and centralizes fine-grained authorization policies via comprehensive, reusable and auditable authorization policies and intuitive administration model.

By centrally defining and managing the authorization privileges that are granted to a user or role (such privileges are called "entitlements"), organisations can lower the cost of administering entitlements and centrally manage compliance initiatives and the enforcement of segregation of duties controls.

The release is the latest in a series of offerings that integrates technology from Oracle and BEA Systems and illustrates Oracle's rapid progress in unifying industry-leading software from the two companies. Organisations using Oracle Entitlements Server 10g R3 can enforce consistent authorization policies at a granular level across the enterprise and more rapidly deploy applications to help ensure compliance, improve business agility, reduce IT costs and achieve operational excellence.

Oracle Customer Services provides complete coverage of Oracle Entitlements Server with the world's leading portfolio of IT lifecycle-based service and support offerings. Oracle Customer Services is focused on helping customers maximize their success with Oracle solutions while lowering the total cost of ownership through continued advances in providing personalized, proactive support and knowledge management capabilities.

The announcement supports Oracle's strategy of delivering complete, integrated and end-to-end product suites on an open, standards-based middleware and database architecture. Oracle's approach helps customers to simplify computing environments, lower cost and risk, and provides greater choice and flexibility.

Oracle Entitlements Server 10g R3 is a key component of Oracle Access Management Suite, the industry's only solution offering next-generation technologies that enable risk-based authentication, pro-active on-line fraud prevention, and fine-grained authorization, as well as best-of-breed functionality including Web access management and identity federation.

Key new features of Oracle Entitlements Server 10g R3 include:

• Enhanced Remote Policy Decision Point: facilitates superior performance for distributed applications by enabling organisations to leverage the benefits of highly distributed policy decisions without incurring large performance penalties typically associated with Web services. This also allows accelerated deployment for organisations looking to leverage consistent policy models across multiple applications.
• Policy Simulation: enables security policy administrators to interactively perform "what-if" analysis of complex entitlement scenarios to help simplify usability, lower policy administration costs, and eliminate policy conflicts that can lead to unauthorized access and insider breaches.
• Virtual Policy Stores: offers enterprise-class scalability for handling large-scale Entitlements Management by enabling administrators to segment policies across numerous applications.
• Delegated Administration: features a highly flexible security framework that allows delegation of administrative functions to users based on their role, enabling tighter integration, better security and improved productivity.
• Integration with Oracle Identity and Access Management Products: features advanced integration with Oracle's broad portfolio of Identity and Access Management products including Directory and Virtual Directory Services, Provisioning and Identity Administration, and Access Management and Federation products.
• Hot-Pluggable Architecture: provides customers more choices, long-term flexibility, and better use of their IT investments through support for heterogeneous platforms, identity management solutions, applications and middleware offerings. The release features native integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware as well as out-of-the-box support for third party applications and platforms including IBM WebSphere Application Server 6.1, Microsoft Active Directory 2003, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft IIS 6.0.