Oracle announced on Friday plans to acquire Tangosol, a provider of in-memory data grid software.This software increases application performance by offering fast, distributed access to frequently used data, according to Oracle. Tangosol’s product, Coherence Data Grid, enables “extreme transaction processing,” or XTP, and is an enabler for the XTP space in businesses such as financial services, telecommunications and the travel and logistics industries, Oracle said. Oracle plans to couple the software with Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle TimesTen and the Oracle Database to serve businesses moving to this model of transaction processing, the company said. “Together, Oracle and Tangosol create the industry’s most comprehensive middleware for building applications that perform real time data analytics, grid-based in-memory computations and high-performance transactions,” said Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian, in a statement released by the company.“Tangosol adds significant customer value to the Oracle Fusion Middleware infrastructure where rapid customer adoption of SOA, Web 2.0 and Event Driven Architecture (EDA) built on Oracle Fusion Middleware is driving the need for high performance, continuously available shared data services to offload and buffer analytic, compute and transaction processing cycles from backend core data processing services,” Kurian said. “Modern architectures like SOA, Web 2.0 and EDA are enabling more agile business processes and applications,” said Tangosol CEO Cameron Purdy in a statement. “However, those same architectures are driving the demand for high-performance access to shared data, creating a very heavy burden on backend data processing services. Oracle and Tangosol can together address the need for a comprehensive data virtualization strategy that can both relieve the load on backend infrastructures while maintaining or increasing performance.”Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close next month.Both Purdy and Kurian are scheduled to appear at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas on Friday. Software Development