CompTIA Blog

For those of you who haven’t watched the NFL this year, here is a season recap of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cincinnati Bengals. The Steelers began the year without their starting quarterback for four games and several other impactful injuries on the offense, namely on their lineman and both backup quarterbacks. With all of those problems, you might expect them to finish last in their division. But that’s not the situation. They continue to win and have been called the best team in the AFC ...

On Tuesday, December 7, the Administration released its “Fact Sheet on the Framework Agreement on Middle Class Tax Cuts and Unemployment Insurance.”  Conspicuously absent was a provision to repeal the new and onerous Form 1099 reporting requirement – which will not go into effect until 2012.The basic concepts of the agreement are as follows:Extended for 13 months: Unemployment benefits at current levelsExtended for 2 years: Existing income tax rates R&D tax credit Child Tax Credit of $1,000 ...

Spiffs, rebates, special discounts and limited promotions are tools all vendors use to tickle their customers into loosening their purse strings. Vendors surrender a little margin in favor of capturing a customer to upsell and expand the sales relationship later. But are these special incentives always worth the expense? How do they affect the partner in the sales process?This is the question Bill Leutzinger, president of telecom reseller TelecomMedic, asked in his recent blog post on Phone Plus ...

The world is moving up into the clouds, of that there is no doubt. Just how the channel will make this migration and what form will businesses take once they arrive remain in question. This week, the Channel-Lands received a reaffirmation commitment in the cloud to partners from one of the largest patrons. We also heard from the new HP chief on his plans for partners. And we’re monitoring some interesting moves by Apple.Microsoft Chief Affirms Channel Cloud CommitmentMicrosoft global channel chi ...

Literally moments after releasing more than a quarter-million sensitive U.S. diplomatic documents, WikiLeaks issued a distress call via Twitter that sounded like something out of Star Trek. It essentially read: “We’re under attack.”The assault aiming to block access to the classified documents was nothing more than a distributed denial of service attack – commonly called DDoS. In hacking circles, DDoS is one of the oldest and relatively simplest of attacks. It leverages the Syn-Ack handshake tha ...

As of December 13th, CompTIA’s new address will be 3500 Lacey Road, Suite 100, Downers Grove, IL 60515.  We’ve been an ardent Chicagoan for 25 years – so we’re not moving far.  In fact, our new office is only 3.5 miles from our former headquarters in Oakbrook Terrace, IL.  But as the Jeffersons said in their iconic TV show, we’re truly moving on up.Why move?  It’s simple.  Our new office space will allow us to better serve you, our members and the larger IT channel.With our new space, we will en ...

Service abuse and warranty fraud (hereafter referred to simply as “warranty fraud”) has been a hot topic in our CompTIA services communities as well as within the industry at large over the past year. And well it should be; recent research by PwC estimates that the cost to the industry is between 3 to 5 percent of revenue. We have all been touched in one way or another by warranty fraud. It’s a pervasive industry problem that, much like shoplifting, can inflate the cost of goods and services to ...

This month the CompTIA Educational Foundation awarded IT Merit Award Scholarships of $250 each to 25 students who are pursuing careers in the information technology industry.  These are kids and young adults who want to make our industry their own. The scholarships are to reward them for their extra efforts in studying for and passing their certification exams and to encourage them to keep going in their studies.  As an industry, we need to cheer on these students and others who want to become p ...

From the first face-to-face meeting of the CompTIA Cloud/SaaS Community, there was ample evidence that we needed to add a sense of clarity to the much used term, ‘cloud’. The questions started out as simple as what exactly ‘cloud’ was and evolved into deeper concerns relative to its impact on the channel (regardless of its meaning). As such, the group decided early on to focus its efforts on providing that clarity for the marketplace, while recognizing it might not be as simple as stringing toge ...

For most of us in the Channel-Lands, it was a short week. The Thanksgiving holiday usually means two-and-a-half days of work, most of which is consumed with preparations for the annual festival of food, family and football. Ah, precisely the reason our forefathers ventured to this great continent. But the technology world didn’t stop spinning just because the menu included cranberry sauce and mashed sweet potatoes. Channel-Lands was still very active with the acquisition of Novell, Oracle winnin ...

Some of the latest Microsoft TV commercials reflect scenes familiar to us all: stranded at airports waiting for crowded flights. In one spot, a couple is dismayed by the wait time for their delayed flight. How will they pass the time? “To the Cloud,” the man exclaims! He connects to his home PC to access a recorded TV show, “Celebrity Rehab: Season Premier.” Boredom abated, his wife says, “Yeah cloud.”Is this the cloud? Or better yet, what is the cloud?Defining cloud computing continues to confo ...

A look at the week of November 22, 2010, in public advocacy for the IT channelThis week, the SBA is cracking down on contractors pretending to be small firms in order to qualify for government deals.  The federal government adopted a new policy requiring agencies to default to cloud-based IT solutions when possible.   Politicians and industry leaders predict favorable tech legislation in 2011.SBA Takes Closer Look At Federal Contractors — The Small Business Administration is stepping up its effo ...

Despite all the attention placed on the importance of health care records and patient confidentiality, U.S. hospitals say data breaches are a fairly common and expensive experience, according to a new report by the Ponemon Institute. The study, sponsored by ID Experts, released last week finds that data breaches are exacting a heavy toll on health care providers. Sixty percent had more than two security breaches in the last year, and the average security breach costs $2 million in direct and in ...

The good people of the Channel-Lands are growing tired of the calendar packed with vendor and industry channel events. The last thing many VARs want to do is climb on another plane to go to Las Vegas or Orlando for another confab. And that’s partly why Comdex returned this week as a virtual trade show. It’s one of the many big things happening in the Channel-Lands this week.Comdex Returns Virtually; RetroDex Debuts LiveBack from the dead, virtually, this week was Comdex. Everything Channel reviv ...

Just when I thought every conceivable use for an iPhone had been devised, along comes another app to prove me wrong. I recently stumbled upon the ‘Fake Conversation’ app which lets me setup a bogus call along with a phony ringtone, display and voice feedback just to complete the deception! I’m not sure what bothers me more; that the demand for a sham call program is so great or that a software developer actually sat down and built it. From fake beer goggles to a mirror program that uses the fron ...