CompTIA Blog

When you hear cries from voters for their politicians to take bold steps to meet challenges, I’m never sure what that means, and I find myself almost always being disappointed. Here's my take. I'll frame it in the context of what is and isn’t bold from one man’s perspective.On corporate taxes…Bold is the wholesale elimination of the corporate tax. “Eliminate the tax, eliminate the loopholes” has the result of eliminating 90 percent of the tax distortions inherent in the system. While you’re at i ...

CompTIA member Scott Barlow is vice president of sales and product management for Reflexion Networks Inc, a hosted email service vendor headquartered in Woburn, Mass. As a contributor and leader of several CompTIA Communities over the years, he brings a wealth of knowledge and extensive partner program experience to CompTIA's initiatives for advancing the IT industry. Barlow understands the solution provider business model and enthusiastically promotes programs he believes will benefit not only ...

A look at the week of September 26 in public advocacy for the IT channel: This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved three controversial data breach bills.  Spending cuts might limit the government’s ability to transition to cloud computing and take advantage of long-term cost savings.  A new Senate bill aims to stop large firms from pirating federal contracts meant for small businesses.Panel Approves Data-Breach Bills Despite Partisan Rancor — The Senate Judiciary Committee approved thr ...

For the first time at our CompTIA EMEA Members Conference, we’re creating three educational tracks to make sure every VAR, vendor, training partner and academy can get the latest trend and technology information that is impacting their particular part of the IT channel.On the training partner side, hear about CompTIA’s soon-to-be-released cloud certificate, tips and tricks for growing your training business, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and how social networking trends are i ...

The paperless office is an idea that has been talked about ever since the personal computer became a mainstay of the modern office. The idea was raised in a notable 1975 Business Week article titled “The Office of the Future.” Some parts of the article are very prescient and the authors predicted that by 1995 technology would exist that would let users access documents at the touch of a button, eliminating the need for paper. However, paper continues to play a very large part in the workplace.Co ...

Earlier this week, Facebook made one of the most costly mistakes a business can make—forgetting who its audience is. Whether the company was hoping to emulate the information stream of Google +, or just following their own unique direction, the changes they made to the popular social media site could prove to be a major misstep. With a streaming newsfeed and subscriber options that Facebook added in one fell swoop (with no notice ahead of time), it was a bit overwhelming for many of its members. ...

The social platform wars heated up this week, as both Facebook and Google+ launched new features to their sites. Google+ announced changes to their Hangouts video chat feature, introduced a search function within the platform (which seemed like a late addition from the leader in online search), and dropped the requirement for invitations to join the service. Facebook gave its users Smart Lists to organize their friends, rolled out the ability to subscribe to interesting people they don’t persona ...

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 ...

A look at the week of September 19 in public advocacy for the IT channel: This week, agencies report doubts about the White House “cloud first” policy as cyberattacks continue to be a rising threat.  Government Health IT takes an in-depth look at the joint electronic health record (EHR) project that the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are working on.  As the job market in the U.S. continues to struggle, lawmakers consider programs to attract foreign investment a ...

The Cisco Learning Network, the Cisco certification social learning community, now features a dedicated page about CompTIA certification. The page educates IT professionals about how CompTIA and Cisco certifications help build strong career credentials for networking professionals. Vendor-neutral CompTIA certifications, specifically CompTIA A+ and Network+, frequently lead to either Cisco’s CCENT or CCNA certifications for a well-rounded resume. In addition, test results have shown that CompTIA ...

Getting Your Act Together…In the beginning it was serious training. What I mean by that comment is that when I started in the tech sector many years ago selling software/services/technology, I was lucky. The manufacturer I worked for not only had extensive  sales and product training resources, but an active management team that worked closely with small groups of salespeople. This was a sales-driven organization, where you had to start fast, could earn great money, and worked with true sales pr ...

CompTIA member Andrew (Andy) Harper is CEO of Gaeltek LLC, a managed IT services provider organization based in Manassas Park, Va. Founded in 2004, the full-service IT consulting firm supports a large number of business clients in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, and throughout the U.S. Andrew has been a contributor to several key industry projects over the years and is currently a member and proponent of the CompTIA MSP Partners Community.Andy has a rather unusual story to tell relating to ...

With more than half of 2011 under our belts, analysts and job seekers are still determining which IT industry forecasts had it right and which were way off.What is clear is that an abundance of job seekers are still seeking that elusive opportunity. Here are some facts and figures to take into account.Globally, IT revenue growth this year is projected to hit 4 percent, based on CompTIA’s quarterly IT Industry Business Confidence Index, an online survey of 1,118 IT companies at the end of 2010.Th ...

With more than half of 2011 under our belts, analysts and job seekers are still determining which IT industry forecasts had it right and which were way off. What is clear is that an abundance of job seekers are still seeking that elusive opportunity. Here are some facts and figures to take into account. Globally, IT revenue growth this year is projected to hit 4 percent, based on CompTIA’s quarterly IT Industry Business Confidence Index, an online survey of 1,118 IT companies at the end of 201 ...

Just a few short years ago when I was chief editor at a channel publication, almost every conversation included numerous references to the amount of margin a product or service could drive. It didn’t matter if I was interviewing a solution provider, vendor or distributor; that one word typically dominated the conversations. Margin was frequently part of the headline and featured in many manufacturers’ promotional information—it was truly the “buzz” word of the day.Has the transition of the chann ...