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The CompTIA Industry Advisory Council members came together for their summer working meeting June 12 to 14 in St. Louis, Missouri. The agenda aligned with the 2018 council goals of understanding emerging technology ecosystems, educating on alternative routes to market, identifying best practice standards, and staying informed on CompTIA's policy and advocacy efforts.
The council’s last meeting in Dallas, Texas, in spring was the start of not only this year’s plan but setting up long-term goals for each of CompTIA’s four Industry Councils. The Channel Advisory Board is made up of traditional technology vendors, distributors and solution providers. They met with the Business Applications Council in both Dallas and St. Louis.
In both instances, the councils looked at how technology solution providers (TSPs) often struggle with explaining what makes them unique to new business application vendors. The Channel Advisory Board wanted to help TSPs better define what value they add to their customers, as well as why SaaS vendors should work with TSPs.
At the summer working meeting, they joined together to help map out the buyer’s journey and different buyer personas. They also tackled soft skills needed for tomorrow’s sales person and how to better understand your expertise and specialties.
The Smart Cities Council held their second-ever meeting. The council has grown in size since spring. Council members came together to discuss prior goal ideas and further refine what they would like to accomplish. Lots of ideas that had surfaced in our spring meeting – like one-page ROI sheets and what prescriptive advice to give about smart cities – were round-tabled. Ultimately, the council narrowed the focus to developing a smart cities vendor playbook, which will be targeted to small- and medium-sized vendors to help them market, sell and build a process around understanding the stakeholders involved. Their other objective in the meeting was to build education around the required skills for selling smart cities to city officials. They identified many skills needed but are going to concentrate on those they deemed most important, such as understanding IoT solutions architecture, AI and machine learning and wireless connectivity. Understanding all the hardware within a smart city implementation, such as sensors, devices, gateways and more, was also termed as essential.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the overall council meeting was the efforts of the new Drone Advisory Council. After hitting the ground running at the first meeting of the year in spring, they quickly identified and rallied around the idea of building business standards for drone service providers. With the right expertise in the room, including two lawyers and multiple solution providers who have added drone to their line cards, the council created a first draft of drone standards for the industry. Our standards expert, Miles Jobgen, director of education for CompTIA, lead the discussion and completed quite a bit of the standard in the short time the council was together. The standards will cover UAS Service and Flight Operations, Policies and Procedures for Operations, Laws, Regulations and Rules, Business Generation and Risk Mitigation and Safety. We are looking to launch the standards in a big way at InterDrone, which is the largest commercial drone event in North America, in September.
This is an exciting time in our industry. Major change is underway, and the CompTIA Industry Advisory Councils are helping the industry in amazing ways. Learn all about the Industry Advisory Councils here, where you’ll find our videos, podcasts and content that will help you understand how the councils are accelerating the growth and expansion of emerging technologies and how to best find your way in the ever-expanding technology industry.
