Oracle Tuesday announced plans to extend the capability of its system management software to offer monitoring and management for SAP AG applications through a partnership with Nimsoft.

The company also unveiled Release 3 of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g and new plug-ins for the product that enable it to manage third-party software. Additionally, Senior Vice President Richard Sarwal made his debut as the executive in charge of stepping up efforts to promote the product as a management system for heterogenous environments.

Oracle and Nimsoft are working jointly to integrate the NimBUS SAP R/3 plug-in with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G so that customers can monitor and manage SAP applications. The plug-in should be available in the second quarter of 2007, according to Nimsoft.

Through new plug-ins for BMC Remedy Service Desk and IBM WebSphere MQ versions 5.3 and 6.0 introduced Tuesday, Oracle also added performance monitoring of those third-party products in Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G.

All of this is part of Oracle's plan to focus on making enterprise management one of its core product offerings not just for Oracle environments, but across IT systems with products from multiple vendors, said Oracle president Charles Phillips on a conference call Tuesday.

"We've undersold this product," he said of Oracle's system management suite. Phillips acknowledged that in the past, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G has primarily been useful for managing environments that run Oracle software and has been sold along with more popular Oracle products such as its database and applications. However, now that it can support more third-party products, such as JBoss Application Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server along with those unveiled Tuesday, it is a more viable option to compete with rivals such as IBM's Tivoli suite and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView suite.

"We were narrowly focused in the past," Phillips said. "Now we have become more complete and more open."

To promote this new attitude toward enterprise management, Oracle now has a dedicated sales force paid to sell only Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, and the company also is training its database and application-server sales representatives so that they can push the product in the marketplace, he said.

During the conference call, Sarwal pointed to Oracle's expertise across multiple software infrastructure products, such as database, application server, and business applications, as a strength the company has to offer comprehensive systems management. "We have a unique view of how to manage all of that stack," he said.

In addition to its new plug-ins, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G Release 3 also includes enhanced provisioning capabilities across Oracle's various application offerings and the ability to bring to the surface business metrics from Oracle applications to perform business diagnostics, Sarwal said.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10G Release 3 is available on Linux and Windows. Business customers can evaluate the product for free by downloading it from Oracle's Web site. The new plug-ins also are available now for use only with Release 3.