Steve Phelps wants to get into the heads of racing fans.

He's chief marketing officer (CMO) of NASCAR and described several business scenarios at HP Dicover 2013 this week. For instance, predictive techniques, such as sentiment analysis, have been used at NASCAR to determine the prevailing mindset of NASCAR fans.

Here's a concise technology rundown from HP Discover 2013 by my longtime colleague, friend (and yes, college classmate!) Eric Lundquist. Check it out and two other Discover posts by Eric.

HP's New Desktop PCs, Retail, Print Services Aimed at Enterprises

First, yesterday the day started with keynotes from Dave Donatelli, George Kadifa and Mike Nefkins. Dave discussed new products in the server, storage and network area, focusing mainly on the software defined ones, describing how HP addresses software defined data centers. George and his team walked us through the HAVEn announcement and showed through three new products how HAVEn can be used to gain better understanding of our IT environments.

U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that centralization and more coordination is essential to imporving federal IT, according to a story on CIO.com. It's estimated as much of a third of the $80 billion the federal government spends on IT is wasted.

Considering the constant bashing that the role of the CIO recieves, the attached may serve as a reminder for some home truths (http://www.siliconrepublic.com/strategy/item/32966-opinion-embracing-the/).

Actor Kevin Bacon opened this year’s Discover keynote by proclaiming that the theory of six degrees of separation has been narrowed to 4.7 degrees.

Yesterday, I got to sit in on a customer advisory meeting prior to the opening of HP Discover. The participants worked in businesses as diverse as oil and gas, consumer goods, insurance and consultancies. We asked them about problems they were having with IT financial management.

I pondered this morning on the days when Information Technology was a set of hardware and software components to buy and build.  Arguably, you can still do that. I still enjoy building a barebones system, but we don’t see that happening in the enterprise very much anymore.

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.

Tuesday was a Big day at HP's Discover, for HP and for me personally. The blogosphere is awash with the news emanating from Las Vegas, and Big Data dominated proceedings, and rightly so. On behalf of my Technology Consulting bretheren we were able to announce a whole new collection of technology consulting services focusd on Big Data. But this time it's different.