grewmore than 25% from the 2018 event, made a conscious effort to share ideas and tackle big problems frommultiple points of view. During the session on recurring revenue, the Managed Services Community invited the entire crowd to their workshop on how to bring XaaS and recurring revenue models to the business of technology. “If we were a startup it would be easy. We were a legacy model,” said West McDonald, describing Tigerpaw’s challenging switch from perpetual licenses to recurring revenue. “You needed a Ouija board and an org chart to figure out what to buy from us.” The first step to changing over is to identify the ways your service offerings fit a recurring revenue model, he said. Starting there, TigerPaw convinced 95%
of its customers to give up their licenses in favor of a subscription. “It had to do with a whole repackaging of our services and a lot of math,” McDonald said. Crossing Paths to Fill in the Gaps During CCF, CompTIA’s Emerging Technology Community debated the top 10 emerging technologies that will disrupt markets and rock the tech industry and found the Internet of Things on the top of the list—a position it has held for many years. To CompTIA’s Chief Technology Evangelist James Stanger, that proves a point: There’s a fundamental gap between what we can do with technology and when it’s widely adopted. “We’ve been talking about ‘the cloud’ for 10 years and we’ve only seen strong implementation over the last three to five years,” said Stanger. He calls it future gap and says it feeds into some other gaps addressed at CCF—the confidence gap, the skills gap and the diversity gap. “We did a root cause analysis for what’s causing these gaps and part of the answer is the 'future gap'.”
The Emerging Technology and Advancing Diversity in Technology communities held a joint workshop to address the diversity gap with emerging, like using AI to reduce bias in job descriptions and career goals. Focused on the gender gap, the Advancing Women in Technology and IT Security communities met in a joint workshop to brainstorm barriers and solutions to the fact that only 14% of the current U.S. workforce in cybersecurity is female. In “Hidden Figures: Opening Up Cybersecurity Careers to Women,” members brainstormed qualities that work well in cybersecurity and steps to take to get a foot in the door. “Get to know the industry,” said Lysa Myers of ESET. “Find someone who will vet you and says, ‘This person is ethical and knows how to work well in a team.’ You need to prove you are reasonable and ethical and are doing things in a way that’s helping people.” For anyone trying to get into technology, there’s a big enough need for skilled workers that sometimes it helps to simply ask. “We need to take that angst and awkwardness out of the ask,” said Kathryn Rose of wiseHer. “People are afraid they’re going to get rejected. If you don’t ask, it’s 100% a ‘no’ so you might as well ask.”
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CompTIAWorld | FALL 2019
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