Configuration vendor Tripwire this week announced it had updated its enterprise management product to now support certain flavors of Oracle databases, which the company says will enable network managers to more easily account for changes made to the systems in compliance audits and governance reports.

Tripwire Enterprise comprises the company's previous products Tripwire for Networks Devices and Tripwire for Servers into one enterprise offering. Tripwire Enterprise 5.5 can now track, document and compare changes made to Oracle 9i and 10g systems against pre-defined company policies or regulatory standards. The Oracle support is in addition to the product's existing capabilities to track changes on Sun One, Active Directory, and Novell eDirectory LDAP servers. In future releases, Tripwire will add SQL support to the software, the company says.

"The product can cover changes made across the silos of IT," says Ted Gary, senior product manager at Tripwire. "It can help customers deal with compliance, security and IT governance efficiency efforts."

Tripwire Enterprise 5.5 uses both centralized server software and software agents distributed on network devices, servers and middleware systems. The product can also work in an agent-less manner to collect data from systems. In the case of databases, the agents collect data on the changes to the system such as index, schema, files systems and access settings alterations.

Network managers input processes, policies and compliance regulations into the software, and it will alert network managers via a Web-based interface to any breaches in the policies. It also comes with canned and customizable reports.

Also among the new features of this release is a capability dubbed "promote by package," which Tripwire says will allow network managers to perform policy upgrades or confirm changes on a one-to-many basis or by exception. That means the network managers won't have to accept the same change across some 500 servers one by one, for instance, but rather just approve the change once for all the appropriate machines.

Tripwire competes with the likes of AlterPoint, BladeLogic, Intelliden, Opsware and Voyence.