CompTIA Blog

Staff training is a key component to any successful business. But when budgets are tight, margins are razor thin, and sales are flat; where does the small business owner turn? Even in these challenging economic times, business owners need to make sure their team has access to relevant instructional content. CompTIA recognizes this need and is making every effort to assemble a comprehensive library of training materials from some of the leading industry experts—and all readily available in the Me ...

I’ve spent the week monitoring the Channel-Lands from afar in the Far East this past week. Honestly, I’ve been a bit disconnected between trying to keep up with a regular workload and taking in the sights and sounds of Shanghai and the surrounding countryside. Nevertheless, all of the headlines and drama of the channel back home have found me behind the Great Firewall of China. Here’s what tops my list for the stories of the week.Have You ‘Hurd’ about the HP-Oracle Drama?As we used to say in my ...

A look at the week of September 7, 2010, in public advocacy for the IT channelThis week, a failure in Virginia computer networks points to huge system-wide vulnerabilities in every major company and government in the country.  The U.S. has fallen short in awarding contracts to small businesses.  Slow improvements in tech-sector hiring raise questions about the sustainability of future job growth in America. Broad Implications for Crash of Va. Computer Network – The failed data storage unit that ...

Dim news of the U.S. unemployment situation seems inescapable. The official unemployment rate stands at 9.5 percent. Despite trillions (with a big T) of dollars spent on stimulus programs, the sluggishly recovering recession isn’t doing much to spur jobs creation.Comparatively speaking, the tech sector’s unemployment rate – roughly 6 percent – isn’t bad. During the depths of the recession, IT vendors shed tens of thousands of workers, and solution providers eliminated jobs as spending grounded t ...

A look at the week of August 30, 2010, in public advocacy for the IT channel The last week of August, a top Pentagon official confirmed a significant cybersecurity breach in which a flash drive was used to infect U.S. military computers.  A recent report touted the $100-billion Recovery Act as a major source of funding for healthcare IT.  Meanwhile, high tech-sector profits have translated into a frenzy of M&A rather than an increase in hiring.  And with elections approachin ...

Oracle’s outspoken CEO Larry Ellison publicly derides the term “cloud computing” regularly, most notably last January, when at an event detailing the closing of the Sun Microsystems’ acquisition he facetiously bellowed, “What does cloud computing mean? It's just computers, databases and networks. If I'm missing something, please tell me know!”Bluster aside; he’s onto something when it comes to definitions.CompTIA’s first research study on cloud computing is near completion, and one thing evident ...

The last week of summer is supposed to be lazy and quiet, and this past week in the Channel-Lands didn’t disappoint. Well, it was quiet with one exception in the ongoing HP-Dell rivalry. In fact, the quiet could actually signify something deeper brewing beneath the surface.PC Sales Rate Slow (or Is It?)Fears of a double-dip recession in the U.S. and Europe caused Gartner to revise its personal computer sales forecast for the second half of 2010. Originally, Gartner said PC sales would rise at th ...

Did you know CompTIA members can provide input on the design of our industry research studies? So not only are the reports available to you for free, we invite members to review and comment on all our studies. We want your input on the scope to help ensure you get the answers you need and we’ll take it any way we can get it; whether it be via email, council or community conference call, online community discussion forum, etc.Even if you are a regular visitor to the CompTIA Member Resource Center ...

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 ...