CompTIA Blog

In my late teens, I had the opportunity to travel with a friend to visit his family in Greece. The Greeks I met were friendly but curious about my origins and would often ask (translated by my Greek-speaking friend) if I was American. I would smile and respond “no, I’m Canadian.” Most of them would smile politely and move on but, on one occasion, a man stopped dead in his tracks and exclaimed, “Canadian, American: what’s the difference?” After I took the time to explain that Canada and the US we ...

On Capitol Hill, Congress is loosely debating the merits of nearly three dozen different pieces of cybersecurity legislation. These bills would impose new requirements for disclosing security breaches, guaranteeing the privacy of individual citizens and giving the government new powers in defending critical infrastructure and prosecuting a cyberwar.To date, the federal government has about a dozen or more cybersecurity laws on the books and scores more that address cybercrime and hacking. All bu ...

The cloud isn’t the most disruptive technology to sweep across the IT marketplace. It’s virtualization, for virtualization is the underlying technology that is enabling new architectures and delivery mechanisms for IT infrastructure, applications and data. Through virtualization, solution providers are delivering and end users are adopting new techniques for maximizing their IT investments and capabilities.We’ll be getting a steady stream of reports out of San Francisco as the virtualization zea ...

Healthcare technology (HIT) encompasses everything from EMR, EHR, ARRA, NIST, ONC, HIPAA, EDC, and CRM to FCC, IRS, CDC, meaningful use and more.  It goes on and on. When you add in the standard VAR vocabulary —3G, UPS, LAN/WAN, IP, HTTP, HTML, and ISP—it quickly becomes a virtual alphabet soup where you almost need a secret decoder ring just to begin to understand it all. Once you begin to comprehend the HIT market opportunity, you quickly see that it’s more than a vert ...

“Wall Street” character Gordon Gecko said in the 1987 film, “Greed is good.” Well, there’s plenty of greed to talk about this week in Channel-Lands. We have bad (and illegal) behavior revealed and a major bidding war to acquire a storage vendor. Not all the news is bad: we also get to celebrate stellar vendor performance and tips for building innovative businesses.Poor Ethics and Bad BehaviorNo industry is immune from greed and corruption. Even the channel has its bad apples. CRN isn’t just call ...

The passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided important incentives to doctors to give up their paper records and transition to electronic health records (EHR).  According to a 2009 CompTIA study, 59 percent of healthcare providers indicated they definitely or probably will take advantage of stimulus dollars for healthcare IT projects.  Under the HiTech Act (which was signed into law as a part of the Recovery Act), most doctors can receive up to $44,000 in Medicar ...

A lot has been said about Mark Hurd since his fall from grace at Hewlett-Packard, but the one thing that his detractors can’t take away is his aptitude for analyzing data and making rational business decisions. It’s a skill sorely missing in the channel, mostly because of the lack of tools and information.Earlier this week, analytics vendor CoreConnex inked a deal to extend its Corelytics Financial Dashboard to members of MSP University. The distribution deal is similar to a deal CoreConnex stru ...

A look at the week of August 23, 2010, in public advocacy for the IT channelThe Office of Management and Budget is looking to scale back $30 billion in high-priority IT projects.  Some small businesses are hoping for passage of a bill that would increase lending and create tax breaks.  In a sign that the economy is improving, many IT professionals are thinking about moving to new companies.  Meanwhile, the Pentagon issued a public warning concerning the Chinese military’s efforts to run clandest ...

Note: This is an addendum to the eight blog entries in which I examine managed services best practices identified in the CompTIA MSP Partners 2010 market research.My favorite baseball team was and always will be the Montreal Expos. They had heart. With one of the lowest payrolls in major league baseball, they had to be smart, where other teams could simply spend. They were quirky – where else in major league baseball was it 99 meters to the right field fence and you could buy a chien chaud (lite ...

More than 1,000 industry leaders were in attendance at our annual Breakaway conference this month in San Antonio. But what? You missed it?We can’t replace the networking that you missed, but we’ll try to update you on the host of the learing opportunities available at the event. The Channel Vanguard Council (CVC), a thought-leadership advisory group to CompTIA, powered two special presentations – transformative revenue models and rethinking sales compensation plans. The idea behind these session ...

Head-scratching. That’s the best way to describe the surprise acquisition of security vendor McAfee by chipmaker Intel. Sure, an imminent McAfee had been perennial watercooler scuttlebutt for the past few years, but everyone – and I mean everyone – thought it would be Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Microsoft or EMC.The market reaction has been swift. Since Intel paid a premium, McAfee’s stock soared nearly 50 percent on the announced deal; Intel’s stock swooned slightly. Partners have been seeking answ ...

Mid-August is the time of year many of us in Channel-Lands long for throughout the year. Moderate weather, a little time left before school starts for the kids, and everyone taking their foot off the business pedal just enough to get everyone a breather. Things seemed quiet this week until a bomb in the form of a massive surprise acquisition went off. And while unemployment woes and the economy struggles to regain its footing, there’s plenty of good news from IT vendor earnings reports. And ther ...

I’ve been a writer/journalist for the better part of 25 years. While I consider myself has having a gift for stringing words together, I am under no illusions that I can do it alone. No matter where I work, I consistently say that my best friend is a copy editor, since he/she not only will pick up my mistakes but help improve the quality of my work. One of my favorite sayings (which I believed I coined) is, “Even Jesus had an editor” (you know, the New Testament was written after Jesus’ death).I ...

Summer blockbuster movies bring together two of my favorite things: the vacation season and great cinema. One reason I love this movie genre is the escape it provides from the everyday routine and all its challenges. Time travel is a frequent occurence in blockbuster movies and it's also a great illustration of a business tool we'd all love to have avaialble. Whether the cinematic feature is Terminator IX, or classics like Star Trek or Back to the Future, the hero gets out of a sticky situation ...

Philanthropic representatives from a dozen leading IT companies met with the CompTIA Educational Foundation as part of its first-ever IT Philanthropy Summit last week during Breakaway. The invitation-only summit provided participants the opportunity to leverage and collaborate with other leaders to make all industry philanthropic programs more effective.The attendees represented AMD, Applied Materials, CDW, Dell, IBM, Intel, iSys, Microsoft, SalesForce.com Foundation, Symantec, VMware and Xerox. ...