I'm really looking forward to listening to IT executives from Spectrum Health, based in Michigan, present at HP Discover today (12 noon Pacific). Spectrum Health, an award-winning, not-for-profit care health organization and largest employer in West Michigan with 19,100 employees, is deploying HP’s modular Flexible Data Center (HP Flexible DC) at its Grand Rapids, MI headquarters.

The news, in recent days, is filled with a story about the NSA’s PRISM system which may, or may not, be a BIG DATA application put together with information provided willingly, or not, by some of the biggest names in computing, like Google, Microsoft, Apple and others. As someone who works in IT one of the first thoughts that entered my mind when I heard the news was “there goes the US based public Cloud market.” Let me offer a few reasons why I may have thought that. 

This week I was working on a presentation for the ISSIP Service Futures SIG titled: Service Futures and Drivers of Change.  Part of the presentation included a discussion of megatrends – the industry independent trends that will shape our lives in the future and their effect on business decision making.  

CIOs are constantly challenged with balancing Enterprise IT priorities in alignment with business objectives. They have to combat the consumerization of IT today while taking the right steps to innovate the planet by 2020. They might take a few tips from HP CEO Meg Whitman, who shares her top five tips for CEOs in this article in Forbes.