Data Central

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Following his speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival, HP CMO Michael Mendenhall sat down with Maria Bartiromo of CNBC to talk about the global trends underlying the biggest challenges for society and business.  In particular, they discussed examples that point towards IT becoming the most valuable resource for addressing these challenges (you can also see the slides from Michael’s presentation at the bottom of this post):

Summary

Secular trends driving change on a global scale:

- Population growth: worldwide population grows 20% to  7.8 billion by 2025

- Urbanization: a new Beijing is built every other month as 60 million people move to cities annually

- Information explosion: information doubles every 4 years, digital content doubles every 18 months

Given that context, Michael says that the infrastructure put in place over the last 100 years won’t be able to support the next 100 years of growth, and that IT can create an intelligent, sustainable infrastructure that supports the demands of a globalized population.  To that point, energy, healthcare, and education are areas of focus for HP:

Energy: The 3rd largest water and sewer utility in the US is using new HP tech to monitor consumption every 5 minutes

Health care: Although 65% of medical records are paper-based, HP has demonstrated at St. Olav’s hospital in Norway that combining advances in areas like mobility and software can dramatically increase the quality of care.  There, patients access information on bedside thin clients and doctors and nurses share information securely through personal mobile devices like notebook computers.

Education: HP is partnering with UNESCO to build the first cloud infrastructure for universities in Africa.

You can find more examples, as well as a related video, in Michael’s slides here: