Major consolidation is looming in the technology industry as the biggest companies look to long-term strategic acquisitions, according to Hewlett-Packard (HP) chief executive, Mark Hurd.

Addressing Oracle's annual OpenWorld user conference this week in San Francisco, Mr Hurd said he expected the companies with the deepest pockets to choose to spend their cash stockpiles on acquisitions rather than investor dividends or stock buy-backs.

"In the end, math wins," he said. "If you look at the math right now in the tech industry, only a handful have $100 billion [ €68 billion] to go play with." Another push for industry consolidation is coming from customers themselves, who want fewer suppliers and greater integration of their IT assets.

"How fast will that consolidation occur?" he asked. "It could happen fast if the right alignment of players occurs."

Mr Hurd, whose own company has bought 23 companies in several rounds of acquisitions in recent years, held back from making a firm prediction that a new major wave of consolidation is coming: "I won't say it will happen, but it could happen."

However, he reiterated that those few companies with the money to spend would be looking for somewhere to place that cash, and that most likely, mergers and acquisitions "will rise to the top of those choices".

Mr Hurd took an unusual approach to his keynote speech, responding live to a series of video questions from conference attendees that were recorded earlier and which he claimed not to have heard in advance.

Asked by one delegate if Google and Yahoo were "friend or foe" to HP, Mr Hurd said HP was delighted with the continuing explosion of data.

"The fact that this ecosystem of data is going global is fantastic for us because it means the companies that help generate it need to keep modernising their infrastructure - meaning more sales for HP."

But the problem of managing that data within a business - an area known as business intelligence - "is going to get harder before it gets easier," he said, noting that people would generate more data in the next five years "than in the history of the planet".

But he noted that due to the speed at which users can get the data they want back from services such as Google, consumers, particularly a new generation that has grown up with the internet, now expect instantaneous responses from businesses as well.

"It's a huge issue for us as businesses. Their tolerance to our traditionally slow response as companies is close to zero."

Yet businesses are not yet able to respond quickly because information inside the company "is not secure, is not authenticated."

He noted than within HP, the company has about 20 petabytes of data in databases that can be drawn upon to answer the 800 million queries that come in annually, many of those to their support centres. The average support call lasts 4.5 minutes.

"So we have 4.5 minutes to get the right answer", a major business intelligence challenge.

In a response to a question about HP's software business, Mr Hurd said that HP is currently the sixth largest software company and that the company eventually wants to lead in the information technology management software sector.

On a lighter note, Mr Hurd noted that his birthday is incorrect in Wikipedia ("I'm actually massively younger"), and that when he regularly plays tennis with Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, he never lets him win.