CompTIA Blog

Interop is taking place this week, providing a venue for IT companies to gather and discuss the latest products and trends within the industry. The day started with keynotes, and from the very beginning the message was clear: everyone wants to talk about the cloud. Dave Donatelli of HP led things off, and although his talk was more sales pitch than keynote, the products he presented were clearly positioned as products that would fit into a cloud solution and allow HP to pursue its goal of holist ...

Legislation remains pending in both the House and Senate that would re-authorize the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Program.  Both programs are set to expire on May 31st.   The Senate legislation would extend the program through 2019, while the House legislation would extend through 2014.Even though the core of this legislation is bi-partisan, dealing with proposed amendments has bogged down action, especially in the Senate, wh ...

SBA Advocacy recently released an important report, “An Examination of the 2001 IRS Tax Gap Estimates’ Effects on Small Businesses.”  The “tax gap” is the difference between the tax that is collected and the tax that should be collected.   In the current budgetary climate, this term is becoming more important. In 2007, the IRS released a report on the estimated 2001 tax gap.  That report found over a third ($109B out of $290B) of the estimated non-collected tax gap was due to underreporting of b ...

Ever since the dot-com bubble burst at the beginning of the last decade, the IT industry has been waging an uphill battle to attract the talent it needs to meet its ever growing workforce demands. Somewhere along the way, as words like outsourcing and off-shoring became permanently derogatory terms in our vocabulary, pursuing an IT career lost its “cool” factor. The reasons I commonly hear from kids and their parents are “why would I want to be in IT?” or “Aren’t all those jobs for programmers ...

Even after all these years, Sam Morris still cringes when he hears it. The brutally honest student expression can determine whether or not that student succeeds or fails miserably in the 21st century global economy.He’s talking about those dreaded words: “Why bother? I’m never going to use this anyway.”Morris, a K-12 and college math teacher of nearly two decades, is working to erase that defeatist line from student lexicon. Last month, he was hired by CompTIA member Lenovo in part to help the l ...

Ever since the dot-com bubble burst at the beginning of the last decade, the IT industry has been waging an uphill battle to attract the talent it needs to meet its ever growing workforce demands. Somewhere along the way, as words like outsourcing and off-shoring became permanently derogatory terms in our vocabulary, pursuing an IT career lost its "cool" factor.The reasons I commonly hear from kids and their parents are "why would I want to be in IT?" or "Aren't all those jobs for programmers be ...

Those in Washington know that the best way to get steam behind a public policy issue is by building on the momentum of a national news cycle. Well this week the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade held a hearing entitled “The Threat of Data Theft to American Consumers”.The hearing was in response to Sony’s announcement on April 26 of a massive data breach caused by computer hackers that resulted in the theft of 77 million user accounts. What caused an even grea ...

Cloud computing, unified communications and virtualization technologies are red hot these days, capturing the attention of solution providers and the media with a number of initiatives and technology releases. Each creates new revenue and practice opportunities for channel partners, with a host of vendors and distributors jumping on the bandwagon. CompTIA has two of these covered with the Cloud and UC communities, as well as business education and tools to build successful practices in these are ...

A look at the week of May 3 in public advocacy for the IT channel This week U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano discussed the need for cybersecurity tactics to be as widespread as the networks themselves.  The new health IT center is attracting bipartisan support as a federal program with high potential for private industry.  Competition to host the government’s cloud computing needs is growing heated. Napolitano: Cybersecurity Is a Public-Private Challenge f ...

The Department of Labor made $240 million available in federal grants for training U.S. workers in high growth, high tech and high skill jobs. U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis announced the H-1B Technical Skills Training Grants program competition yesterday. Grants will be awarded to help workers update current job skills or acquire new skills so they can enter career pathways that lead to higher-paying jobs, including positions in information technology. The Department of Labor expects to fu ...

Legislation is expected to be introduced in the Senate that would require any seller to collect and file sales tax returns on all interstate sales.  Long-supported by a number of states, this anticipated legislation would bring some uniformity to state sales tax requirements but would require even small businesses to collect sales tax and file returns for any sales made into another state.  Under current law established in a 1992 Supreme Court decision, a seller is only required to collect sales ...

The recent cloud outages spotlight the need to focus on disaster recovery (DR) more than ever. Whether it's a large public cloud or your own small private cloud having a plan, a contingency and a course of action are crucial to getting up and running and minimizing loss of data.CompTIA has attempted over the course of the last 18 months or so to generate traction from the channel around the creation of a DR member community. For those who aren't aware, CompTIA has nearly a dozen member communiti ...

The Department of Labor made $240 million available in federal grants for training U.S. workers in high growth, high tech and high skill jobs.U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis announced the H-1B Technical Skills Training Grants program competition yesterday. Grants will be awarded to help workers update current job skills or acquire new skills so they can enter career pathways that lead to higher-paying jobs, including positions in information technology. The Department of Labor expects to fun ...

The change of seasons may be upon us finally, with a cold and snowy winter breaking into a warm and turbulent spring. No, I’m not revisiting my Earth Day column from last Friday, but the change of seasons seems to revitalize the business community, from solution providers and their customers to the vendors and distributors. A legion of new product and service offerings are rolled out at a number of conferences and events, while many companies put their business expansion plans into action.It is ...

A look at the week of April 25 in public advocacy for the IT channel This week, Amazon’s cloud computing malfunction raised questions about the security and reliability of the service.  The Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs plan to collaborate on a joint electronic health record. CompTIA released a new study examining the rise of green IT initiatives in corporations. Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts — As technical problems interrupted computer ...