CompTIA Blog

At Breakaway 2010, more than 160 IT Service thought-leaders gathered to participate in a large-scale industry SWOT analysis. At issue was how IT services companies could best harness and address their internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats. Areas of discussion included reducing business costs, increasing revenue, furthering market share, driving process efficiency and creating greater customer satisfaction. The results were overwhelmingly comprehensive w ...

Todd Thibodeaux, CompTIA CEO and president, and David Valdez, senior director of public advocacy, earlier this week weighed in on the future of online privacy, recommending steps Congress and the Federal Trade Commission can take to keep us safer online.  In posts on The Hill’s Congress Blog and TMCnet.com, Todd and David noted that Congress’s challenge, moving forward, will be to protect consumers while encouraging new innovations online.Some of their recommendations include: Providing the FTC ...

A look at the week of November 1, 2010, in public advocacy for the IT channel A new health IT grant program aims to build insurance exchange systems between states.  Government workers have been scouting hacker conventions in search of new employees.  Cloud computing technology raises questions about data ownership and security. HIT Grants Help States Build Insurance Exchange — The Obama administration has launched a new grant program designed to help states establish the onli ...

It’s been a tough football game. Your team is down by four points but has the ball on your own twenty-yard line with less than two minutes to go and no time outs remaining. The coach has given the quarterback several plays that he believes will accomplish the short-term goal: to get the ball in the end zone and allow the team to win the game. After several well-executed plays, the quarterback is faced with what could be the last chance to score; third down and eight yards to go. He takes a time ...

Last week the CompTIA Educational Foundation contributed $100K to the newly formed Year Up Chicago, the local branch of a highly successful workforce development non-profit now in eight cities. As with our grant to the Chicago Academy of Advanced Technology (CAAT) in the spring, this grant is intended to keep the Chicago location moving forward and to challenge other local foundations and corporations to step to the table and support this effort to get people sustainable jobs.The first Year Up c ...

by Ray Barber, guest blogger from KaseyaServices providers (SPs) traditionally provided clients with a mixture of the break-fix model, point solutions and out-of-the-box products that tied clients down to vendors for extended periods of time, even when those products didn’t necessarily work. But, the days of single-minded inflexible quick IT fixes are fast coming to an end.During the last five years, there has been a dramatic shift in the way people consume IT products and services, and the SP i ...

The Technology Channels Association (TCA) is merging with CompTIA to create the U.K.’s largest trade association for the channel, the CompTIA TCA Community. In addition to TCA benefits, such as Confidence Assurance, TCA members now gain access to CompTIA’s portfolio of educational and operational resources.Keith Warburton, president of TCA, commented on the new merger:“These are exciting times for the Technology Channels Association as we become the latest community of CompTIA. As a 17-year-old, ...

In the past few months, I have had the privilege of working on CompTIA’s strategy for developing cybersecurity credentials to meet the unprecedented challenges to securing technology networks at home and abroad. I have been to meetings, talkfests, lobbying sessions; I’ve had meals and meetings with 3- and 4-stars and civilian leadership at the highest levels in our government.It’s been a privilege to sit down with C-level leaders of companies who are providing the talent and the tools to secure ...

With Halloween rapidly approaching and increased reported sightings of vampires, werewolves, zombies and other creatures from the netherworld; I can’t help but note the similarities between these creatures and a business transformation gone awry. While no one would intentionally transform their organization with visions of ghoulish, brain eating zombies as a potential outcome; a company reminiscent of the walking dead could be the unintended result of poor planning and execution. Despite the ris ...

A look at the week of October 26, 2010, in public advocacy for the IT channel This week, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security have developed new procedures to address a domestic cyberattack.  Tech companies are being heavily affected by immigration policy in their ability to recruit and maintain the talent they need.  The Obama Administration has slowed in implementing the privacy provisions for medical data in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment ...

After a short discussion on the definition of cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service), leading panelists at the CompTIA EMEA Member Conference took to discussing the guidelines and best practices companies can engage in to help educate customers when implementing SaaS.Vlad Mazek, CEO of Own Web Now, shared that building a cloud service offering should be done, ironically enough, brick by brick. As service providers must build their authentication model over the cloud – so they must ask customers, ...

The barriers to collaboration online continue to fall, more and more, year over year. With the volume of people sharing content on Facebook, YouTube, Google apps, and others increasing by thousands each month, more than the majority of people now are on some form of online community.With this collaborative access to new products and services, interactions between vendor and customer change the process of discovery for the audience. How do you get engaged and use communities for mega collaborati ...

Finally, Microsoft has something to celebrate: Windows 7. More than 240 million licenses have sold since its release a year ago. It’s an amazing accomplishment considering the beleaguered Windows Vista only sold 300 million copies over its lifetime and most of those became shelfware collecting dust.But is Windows 7 the last hurrah for Microsoft and the desktop operating system? Outgoing Microsoft chief architect Ray Ozzie seems to think so. In a farewell memo sent to Microsoft employees that som ...

In one particularly memorable episode of The Simpsons, Homer joins a secretive organization similar to many of today’s service clubs.  When Marge asks him about the new club, he exclaims “It's wonderful Marge, I've never felt so accepted in all my life. These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.” This quote is particularly funny since it seems to occur so often—sometimes joining an organization can truly be this impersonal and seemingly ...

One of the big stories coming out of last week’s Interop show in New York was the number of vendors offering IPv6 enabled and compatible devices. The word on the street: IPv6 is not just coming to market, but an imperative for adoption.For solution providers who have suffered through the steady decline in networking gear margin erosion and commoditization, IPv6 may be a godsend. Nearly the entire IT infrastructure is standardized on IPv4 – the standard that reconciles numeric IP addresses with o ...