Oracle plans to enter the application lifecycle management space, the company said on Tuesday. While companies such as IBM, Borland and, lately, Microsoft, have been battling out in ALM, Oracle has remained on the sidelines. But not anymore.“Oracle’s focus on the ALM space is part of our long-term strategy to ensure our customers have the resources and technology they need to design, develop, deploy and manage large-scale software applications throughout the entire application lifecycle,” the company said in a statement. “This requires bringing together a variety of diverse people who are contributing to different parts of the software process and allowing them to share information quickly and effectively.” “Continuing to build on Oracle Fusion Middleware’s Hot-Pluggable philosophy, we expect that the Oracle ALM solution will respect the current technology investments that companies have made in this space and work with a variety of both popular and home-grown software packages,” the company said.“We also expect the Oracle solution to allow companies to be more efficient and maintain better control and predictability over their enterprise applications,” the company said. Software Development