SAN FRANCISCO — Kicking off its annual OpenWorld user and partner conference in San Francisco Monday, Oracle Corp. formally introduced a collaboration software tool that it said is targeted at large organizations grappling with the problem of collaboration “fragmentation.”

The product, called Oracle Beehive, was announced by Oracle President Charles Phillips during his keynote presentation. Phillips described Oracle Beehive, a successor to Oracle’s Collaboration Suite product, as a “brand new product” for enterprise collaboration that Oracle has been developing for the past three years.

Oracle Beehive encompasses and integrates such functions as team workspaces, calendars, instant messaging, and e-mail using a unified object model that also takes advantage of security capabilities in the Oracle database, officials said. Beehive can be used with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange or Lotus Notes, and can run on Windows, Linux, or Solaris systems. It became available in May to select customers. Oracle is pricing the product, which can be used on-premises as a licensed software product or on-demand, at $120 per user.

Chuck Rozwat, Oracle’s executive vice president of product development, who joined Phillips during his keynote, said the challenge that Beehive is designed to address is the proliferation of disparate collaboration technologies. “The problem is collaboration fragmentation,” Rozwat said. “There are too many databases, security measures, and management [approaches]. Beehive integrates all of these capabilities together.”

At a press conference following Phillips’ keynote, Oracle was questioned about whether Beehive, which will compete against Microsoft’s SharePoint and other products, was late to market.

Greg Crider, Oracle’s senior director of product marketing, said the company is “looking at a combination of trigger events” that will create an opportunity for Beehive. He mentioned companies engaged in merger and acquisition activity that need to standardize on a collaboration tool; companies that may have added a new user community or constituency; and companies that are undertaking new business processes and want to enable them with collaboration technology.

“Our customers are asking for a new kind of experience around collaboration,” Crider said, emphasizing that integration and openness are key to that new experience.

Oracle Beehive was the first of many product announcements and enhancements Oracle will make during the four-day OpenWorld conference, which is being held for the 12th time here in San Francisco. This year, Oracle estimates OpenWorld attendance at 43,000 people, up 5% from last year.

Oracle announced a new iteration of its E-Business Suite, designated Version 12.1, that features enhancements to the product’s human resources, financial, supply chain, and customer relationship management functions. In addition, Oracle announced a pre-built integration capability for new product introductions from its Agile PLM product to E-Business Suite and what it described as the “next generation” of its customer support platform, called My Oracle Support.

During his keynote, Phillips discussed how the past year has been “a year of innovation” for Oracle, producing 4,000 enhancements to the nearly 3,000 products the company offers. In the past five years, he noted, Oracle has acquired 50 companies, spending $34 billion in the process.

The company’s strategy across its database, middleware, and applications products is summed up, Phillips said, as “complete, open, and integrated.” In citing Oracle’s success with its strategy — revenue up 25% to $22.4 billion in its latest fiscal year and an 18% uptick in its stock price — Phillips halted his keynote to introduce this summer’s poster boy for success: Michael Phelps, the winner of eight gold medals in the Beijing Olympics.