Your Top Association News to Use this Week — January 25, 2012

CompTIA Storage+ Powered by SNIA Certification Launches Worldwide   IT Executives Anticipate Expect Good, Not Great Year in 2012   Subject Matter Experts Needed for Certification Exam Development   Help for Vendors to Manage their Tier II and Tier III Channel Base   Trend Micro Gives Back to Veterans Connect with us:

CompTIA Storage+ Powered by SNIA Certification Launches Worldwide Ready to prove your expertise in the data storage market? CompTIA Storage+ Powered by SNIA combines the thought and technical leadership of SNIA with the global certification development and management capabilities of CompTIA. The result is a certification recognized globally as the standard for validating IT professionals who manage data storage. The certification is highly relevant for a number of jobs in IS and IT departments, including storage networking managers, system integrators, product developers, networking systems engineers, and technical marketing personnel. Read more.     IT Executives Anticipate Expect Good, Not Great Year in 2012 In our IT Industry Outlook 2012 report, IT companies express tempered optimism heading into the first quarter of the year, though longer-term prospects look more promising. We’re projecting a worldwide IT industry growth rate of 4.5 percent in 2012, with upside potential of 7.6 percent. The forecast for the U.S. market is slightly lower. IT industry executives are most bullish on IT services and software sales this year. “We may see modest improvement in 2012, but it likely won’t be drastically different from 2011,” said Tim Herbert, vice president, research, CompTIA. In our 2012 outlook, we also identified 12 trends to watch that will make their mark on the IT industry and the broader economy in the upcoming year. Read more.     Subject Matter Experts Needed for Certification Exam Development CompTIA relies on Subject Matter Experts (known in the acronym-happy world as a “SME”) to provide objectives and blueprints for our exams. These IT professionals confab with peers and our CompTIA staff at exam development workshops at our headquarters in Downers Grove, Ill. Together, this brain trust creates and reviews items associated with the latest in technologies, knowledge sets and best practices in the IT industry. We need SMEs in document imaging, cloud computing and PC repair/troubleshooting for three upcoming workshops. For both the SMEs and their employers, it’s a chance to influence the direction of the industry by taking part in creating standards. Interested in lending your expertise? Read more.     Help for Vendors to Manage their Tier II and Tier III Channel Base Most IT vendors commit the majority of their budget, resources and focus to the top 15 to 20 percent of their partners that drive the most revenue. These are the relationships with the greatest vendor engagement. Meanwhile, engaging the 80 percent of their partner base that drives smaller revenue has been more challenging. Listen to insights from Nancy Hammervik, CompTIA’s SVP of industry relations, on how IT vendors and distributors can bring that 80 percent into the revenue mix by maximizing free CompTIA resources from our ChannelKIT.     Trend Micro Gives Back to Veterans We were recently bowled over by the generosity of employees at Trend Micro, who reached down deep before the holidays to help veterans who are trying to make it in the IT field. Their generosity will help our Creating IT Futures Foundation recruit more veterans to the IT-Ready Apprentice Program. To show our appreciation and recognize their efforts, we’re featuring Trend Micro in this month’s "Kudos for Caring". Wonder if a workplace giving campaign is something your company could do? Check out our blog post on corporate philanthropy. It’s a great "how-to" introduction for companies that may be just beginning to think about ways to give back.   UPCOMING EVENTS How to Leverage the CompTIA Security Trustmark™ in Your Business February 21 at 1:00 p.m. (CT) Free CompTIA webinar   CompTIA Annual Member Meeting April 10-12 Chicago, IL   More IT Channel Events   MEMBER CONNECTIONS Webinar: Creating a Layered Security Strategy The tools that hackers have at their disposal are more numerous and sophisticated than ever. IT organizations need to better understand how to deploy layers of security in concert with one another in order to construct the best defense possible. Check out Tech Security Today’s Jan. 26th webinar.   © 2012 CompTIA Properties, LLC, under license to CompTIA Member Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved. CompTIA Worldwide Headquarters, CompTIA, Inc. 3500 Lacey Road, Suite 100 Downers Grove, IL 60515-5439, U.S.A. To read previous issues of CompTIA Connect, click here.