Oracle Corp., which has spent $34 billion to buy 50 companies over the past few years, has aggressive plans to continue its acquisition strategy over the next five years, company President Charles Phillips said yesterday.

Speaking at a session for executives at OpenWorld, Oracle's annual user and partner conference in San Francisco, Phillips said that Oracle completed a new five-year plan last summer that calls for a continuation of a strategy that has seen Oracle acquire such companies as PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, Siebel Systems, and BEA Systems in recent years.

Phillips suggested that over the next five years, the level of acquisition activity could be similar to what Oracle has accomplished in the past 44 months.

"There is plenty of acquisition opportunity in the industry," Phillips said. "We have access to innovation around the world because of our balance sheet and acquisition strategy." In a sense, he said, Oracle "is the IPO market for the software industry."

In a keynote speech earlier this week, Phillips also discussed Oracle's acquisition strategy, saying the company's approach of acquiring companies and technology, as well as developing new technologies on its own, has resulted in success for Oracle's three-pronged product strategy in databases, middleware, and applications.

"Software is a fixed-cost business, and scale is key," he said.

In his remarks to the executive group today, Phillips did not indicate what types of technologies or companies Oracle would seek to acquire going forward. But Oracle did announce earlier this week the formation of two new business units to pursue opportunities in the insurance and health sciences industries, segments, Phillips claimed, in which arch-rival SAP "is lacking."

Oracle is not lacking for cash with which to continue its aggressive acquisition strategy. In its most recent fiscal quarter ended Aug. 31, 2008, improved profit margins helped push the company's cash and cash equivalents on hand to the $8 billion mark.

Separately yesterday, Oracle introduced what it called its first hardware product in the company's 31-year history, a storage server that can be integrated with Oracle database server to deliver high-performance analytical query performance.

Oracle actually introduced two new hardware products. The first, the Exadata Storage Server, works with Oracle database servers to boost query performance through a combination of on-board intelligence and parallel query optimization. The Exadata Storage Server offers 12 terabytes of storage, two on-board Intel processors, and a 1 gigabyte-per-second InfiniBand channel connecting the storage server to customers' existing Oracle database servers.