Business software company Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced on Friday that it reached an agreement to purchase Tangosol Inc., a provider of in-memory data grid software, a move aimed at boosting its middleware offerings.

Tangosol is a private software vendor that creates technology allowing data to continuously be in memory across a large array of computers. The acquisition will further help Oracle provide real time software infrastructure for a number of different segments. Financial details of the purchase were not disclosed.

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.

The acquisition follows a string of other corporate purchase by the world's largest database maker. Oracle has spent over $20 billion buying companies, including PeopleSoft, Siebel and Hyperion to challenge SAP, the leader in business-management software.

Oracle expects the transaction to close in April 2007.

Shares of Oracle dropped 1.35 percent, or 25 cents, to $18.25 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

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