The spread of mobile devices and cloud services has made workers more productive, but also introduced new issues of accountability and control. IBM and Oracle Corp. both moved to address these complexities this week through acquisitions.

IBM’s acquisition of Italian startup CrossIdeas s.r.l. gives it a new set of tools to help organizations track which employee is accessing what information and to address issues that arise when users information they’re not supposed to.

CrossIdeas claims that IDEAS empowers admins to be more effective in catching permission violations and identify less obvious conflicts that may have fallen through the cracks in the past, such as a manager being transferred to a different project but still retaining access to files pertaining to their previous initiative. That value proposition has earned it big-name European customers such as Ferrari S.p.A. and Telecom Italia.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Big Blue said CrossIdeas will become part of its Identity and Access Management business. IDEAS is already integrated with the tech stalwart’s governance stack, which should make the merger smoother than it otherwise would have been as far as the software itself is concerned.

Orchestrating the pieces

While IBM is looking to simplify how applications are accessed in the enterprise, rival Oracle Corp. is working to streamline the way enterprise users carry out the work that software is designed to support. The database maker took another major step toward that goal with its acquisition of TOA Technologies Inc., which it announced this morning. No financial details were disclosed.

The Beachwood, OH-based startup sells a cloud-based service that serves as a virtual control tower for field support, providing a central point of control that allows dispatchers to coordinate technicians based on metrics such as skill set, inventory, proximity and availability. The solution identifies the best candidate for a task, pushes the request to the device the designated employee is using and captures the whole process with built-in monitoring capabilities.

TOA also boasts a formidable customer base that includes DISH Network Corp. Vodafone Group Plc and Home Depot, Inc. Oracle said that it intends to integrate the company’s technology into its Customer Experience Cloud portfolio and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, but avoided addressing the biggest bump on the road to the merger: that TOA’s service is available in a specifically built for Salesforce.com, which is one of Oracle’s top competitors. Oracle didn’t say how it will address the competitive issue.

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