Storage firm EMC has announced plans for a major acquisition spree designed to strengthen its position in the market.

The company has $9.8bn (£6.3bn) in cash and investments, and has set a budget for innovation for the year ahead of $7bn (£4.5bn), including acquisitions. The announcements were made at the EMC World customer and partner event in Florida.

"We will continue to invest in R&D and innovation even though we are making cuts elsewhere in the business," said Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and chief executive. "We will use opportunistic mergers and acquisitions, and we will be a consolidator."

Tucci added that EMC is inclined to make acquisitions in areas where it is already strong, such as storage, virtualisation and security.

The company does not intend to grow its presence in the server market, as Cisco had done, but will continue to focus on the storage infrastructure space. "We are aligned and focused only on x86 servers," Tucci said.

EMC also has no plans to enter the business of building datacentres, even though it is expanding its cloud offerings, such as with Atmos Online.

"We will be joining with partners to give customers access to datacentres in Europe, although that is not to say we won't have any datacentres there at all, " Tucci concluded.