Oracle on Monday acquired Oblix, one of the last remaining independent providers of identity management software.

The acquisition moves Oracle into competition with CA, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Sun as major vendors trying to craft identity management suites. Consolidation has been the hallmark of the identity market as CA snapped up Netegrity, Sun bought Waveset and now Oracle has acquired Oblix and its three products: Core ID for Web access management, ShareID for identity federation and CoreSV, for adding identity services to Web services.

Last year, Oracle acquired Phaos for its federation software and integrated it with Oracle Identity Management. Oracle also will integrate the Oblix technology into the platform as well as continue to provide Core ID, ShareID, and CoreSV, as individual products.

Oblix has among its customer base American Airlines, Boeing, British Airways, CEMEX, Chicago Board of Trade, Cisco Systems, Flextronics, General Dynamics, General Motors, Hitachi, Ingersoll-Rand, Norsk Hydro and the United States Postal Service.

Oblix also has a major partnership with Microsoft, which is trying to pull together a network of partners to build identity tools on top of Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS). Recently, Oblix and a handful of other companies formed the MIIS Alliance to collaborate on developing software and services around the Microsoft platform.

Terms of the deal were not announced, but sources say that Oracle paid $90 million to acquire Oblix, a company run by industry veteran Gordon Eubanks and rumored to have turned down nearly $400 million a few years ago from another suitor. Sources say Oblix was losing engineers and other staff as it struggled to hold on to its independent status in a converging market.

In January, the outspoken Eubanks told Network World, “I think we are the last remaining heterogeneous solution that delivers end-to-end identity and Web services management. But we can’t sit on our ass.”

Experts, however, have been saying that consolidation was inevitable because end-users, especially major multi-national corporations, would shy away from implementing identity systems on the back of a hodge-podge of products from small vendors. Instead, analysts and others said those users would favor buying a complete identity platform from a single vendor.