During CompTIA’s 2014 Council Planning Meeting in Miami last week, the Partner Advisory Council (PAC) shared three key issues.
- Cloud infrastructure’s impact on the data center and OEMs, and of course the impact on the product and service businesses of our partners.
- The impact of hosted apps and OSs on legacy premise environments.
- The consumerization of IT and its impact on resources, especially in the area of transforming existing product sales champions to trusted business architects.
The PAC has already embarked on a financial modeling project that will showcase a good, better, best P&L scenario based on varying partner business models, allowing partners to compare their P&Ls and see firsthand where they need to make changes.
The Telecom Advisory Council (TAC) has commissioned a rarely seen before research study to validate and compare the telecom and IT marketplaces. The results of this research will spur ongoing dialogue and development of educational resources to aide in the accelerated convergence of these industries. The TAC is also discussing the impact of wireless over the next three to five years as it attempts to add more wireless partners to the TAC demographics.
With less than a year under their belt, the TAC shared its strategy to reach out to IT solution providers regarding opportunities in telecommunications. The PAC recommended focusing on convergence. The TAC walked away with some solid advice: To get the attention of VARs, the TAC realizes it must bundle services that are more appealing for VARs, including business continuity and VoIP.
The Vendor Advisory Council (VAC) had three key priorities for 2014, including:
- The development of HR training curriculum on channel history and dynamics; as it has been determined that most channel employees (vendors, distributors, partners) do not really understand the channel they support.
- The development of a new CompTIA certification for delivery outcomes, something the CompTIA certs team will need to investigate. However the request is to validate if someone can actually deliver a business outcome.
- Development of an industry-wide certification tracking database to include CompTIA and all vendor certification holders in one place. If done right, this could have huge impact on credibility with a tie-in to applications like LinkedIn.
Other areas for quick wins include enhanced involvement in CompTIA lobbying and advocacy efforts with a focus on data storage and protection, and updated provider definitions and SIC/ NAICS Codes for the U.S. government. The VAC also discussed a long term and complex project that would include building out a standard service catalog to include provider definitions and estimated hours to complete projects. The catalog would define what is, and what is not, involved in a specific service repair. It was suggested this could be a crowdsourced effort.
In summary, the Council Planning Meeting was a huge success and now we can hit the ground running in 2014!
