Todd Thibodeaux Posts

Over time I've become quite the political junkie. I read loads of books, blogs and editorials and watch the Sunday morning political shows religiously, very often shaking my head at the stupidity of the bellicose pundits. But you know what gets me really riled up?! Rarely do any of these so-called journalists (political talking heads) ask the tough questions.Are the President’s numbers up or down? Is Congress loathed and by how much? The media's attention span doesn't go much beyond +/- 3 percen ...

This past week I attended an event hosted by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE for short) at the Philadelphia Convention Center. I wasn't quite sure what to expect never having attended before. Walking away I was very impressed by the energy, diversity and professionalism of the show. I also left thinking this could have been an education focused hall of a larger IT event. Think Comdex meets classroom.Technology use in education continues to climb the ladder. From colla ...

Do you need a social media makeover? Do you use Twitter and Facebook to drive your business? Are you on LinkedIn? Do you use a resource like Constant Contact to stay in touch with customers and prospects? Do you even know what your customers “like”? If the answer is no to any of these questions, you might be in need of a “social media makeover”.At the upcoming CompTIA Breakaway in Washington, D.C., the first week of August, we are featuring the results of a social media makeover done for one luc ...

Prior to the economic downturn in late 2008, the challenge we most commonly heard was the inability to find enough skilled personnel. During that period there were as many as 1.3 million unfilled tech jobs in the U.S. market. As the economy sank, so did that number, to a low of just over 200,000 open positions in the second half of 2009. And as we've seen a recovery to a number close to half of a recent high water mark, the comments about not having access to a large enough pool of quality talen ...

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 ...

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 ...

I am an extremely mobile and well-equipped executive. On a recent trip to South Korea, I carried an iPhone 4, two Android phones, an Apple Mac Book Pro, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet, an iPad 2, a Microsoft Zune media player, an iPod Touch, a CLEAR WiMax modem, a Verizon 4G LTE modem, Sprint 3G hotspot and last but not least a Verizon/Motorola Zoom tablet and a Amazon Kindle e-book reader.You might be asking yourself why would someone carry so many pieces that do similar things? Well my answer is you ...

This week Verizon released results from its annual IT security study conducted in cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service and the Netherlands Policy Agency. The study found that while penetrations increased to a record high 760 in 2010, the number of records compromised in the process fell dramatically to around 4 million from 144 million in 2009.  While hacking and malware continue to make up the largest chunks of the problem, physical intrusions such as compromising and ATM were up sharply.Bu ...

One thing the IT industry doesn't get enough credit for is the innovations it makes in its own business models and delivery. The IT industry is shockingly young compared to oil, transportation and other conglomerations, yet it may have gone through more variations than all the others combined. If the introduction of the personal computer into the business and consumer mainstream in the early 1980s marks the birth of the modern IT industry, for a 30-year-old, it's worn a lot of hats.The early '80 ...

Economic growth covers up a lot of warts, but when growth isn't there, those blemishes start to look pretty ugly. Elected officials at the federal, state and local level are beginning to wipe the steam off the bathroom mirror and they aren't liking the options staring back at them.Everyone is better at managing when times are going gangbusters. Really, how difficult was it to manage the U.S. economy in the second half of the 1990s? The economy was growing at near emerging market rates. Federal a ...