CompTIA EmTechCast

Listen in as Gary Bixler, VP Global Member Communities at CompTIA introduces you to the newest podcast from CompTIA's communities and councils: the Biz Tech Podcast. This podcast series focuses on the business of technology and CompTIA Corporate Membership. From casual conversations, detailed strategies and steps for success, listen in as we hear from industry leaders across our communities and councils discuss business challenges, opportunities, and strategies for success. We also dive into the leading and emerging technologies and what that means for your customers and your business. The CompTIA Biz Tech podcast launches on Wednesday, June 3, 2020.

Share with us what topics you would like to hear more about: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VRN8RW6

You can find the new Biz Tech Podcast on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/comptia-biz-tech-podcast/id1513232070Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/comptia-sharkbytes/comptia-biz-tech-podcastiHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-comptia-biz-tech-podcast-62773128/

As well as on Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and your favorite podcast catchers!

When Doug Hazelman asks MSPs what they’re most excited about and what they’re most afraid of they come back with the same answer: artificial intelligence. “They know it’s likely to bring about the most possible disruption but they’re not sure how to implement it,” he said. “And what happens when AI becomes self-aware? We’ve all seen enough movies that it’s something that concerns us.”

Almost every MSP is interested in adding AI but not many know what to do with it, said Hazelman, vice president of technical marketing at MSP360, formerly CloudBerry Lab. In this episode of the EmTech Cast from CompTIA’s Emerging Tech Community, Hazelman talks with CompTIA Vice President of Member Communities Jim Hamilton about how emerging tech is helping MSPs drive their businesses, challenges they face and money making opportunities for the future.

Listen for ways robotic process automation (RPA) can help replicate monotonous tasks and help customers become more productive, the added security risks of living on the bleeding edge of emerging technology and how tools like chatbots can free up human talent resources on the MSP side. “It’s difficult to let a chatbot take a ticket from open-to-close but if you can have a ticket from open-to-try-a-couple-of-things-and-pass-it-off, now your tech doesn’t have to do those first two steps,” Hazelman said.

Subscribe to the CompTIA EmTech Cast on your favorite podcast app and look for Breaking Barriers, an MSP-focused podcast, from CompTIA’s MSP Community. For more on Doug Hazelman, listen to his podcast, MSP Voice: https://mspvoice.com, and follow him on Twitter @vmdoug and on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/user/VMDoug.

For more on Robotic Process Automation (RPA), listen to this episode: https://mspvoice.com/msp-voice-episode-18-alvaro-prieto-from-auxis/ and read more the world of MSP360 at msp360.com.

Robots go back hundreds of years — read about the praying robot they found in Italy, says Veo Robotics Chief Architect Scott Denenberg — but what people are doing with robots today, especially in manufacturing, can only be called the Golden Age of robotics.

In this episode of the EmTech Cast, Denenberg sits down with Jim Hamilton, vice president of CompTIA’s member communities, to discuss robotics in manufacturing, the concept of collaborative robotics and making robots safe for human environments. “People are comfortable working by a robot as long as its caged,” Denenberg said.

Instead of designing a manufacturing process to be completely automated or to be completely manual — both of which can be expensive — Veo helps manufacturers, engineers and systems engineers design processes that use the dexterity and judgement of humans in combination with the efficiency of robots. Listen for ways systems integrators can work with robotics companies to make money, and how you can profitably bring robotics to your own customers.

For more on robotics from Veo, visit https://www.veobot.com/, watch this video about Veo's technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pAzE_YLW1w and follow Veo's blog, https://www.veobot.com/blog. For more on Scott Denenberg, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdenenberg/ and follow Veo on Twitter at https://twitter.com/veobot.

Keep up on all the big ideas in emerging tech by subscribing to CompTIA’s EmTech Cast on your favorite podcast app.

Jim Gitney, CEO of Group50, believes being able to verify both the complete chain of custody and a product’s provenance will have such a rocking impact on the supply chain economy that it will save trillions of dollars.

In this episode of the EmTech Cast, Gitney talks with Jim Hamilton, vice president of CompTIA’s member communities, about the efficiencies blockchain produces, how it can reduce corporate overhead and how blockchain technology protects against counterfeits, from milk to lettuce to Gucci bags. “I believe the disruption associated with verifications and counterfeiting will impact global GDP by 4 or 5 trillion dollars over the next few years,” Gitney said.

Using blockchain technology, you have an immutable ledger that can’t be changed, and that ledger is owned by many people. “Now I have a higher trust level that the product being sold is what it is described to be,” Gitney said. “Using blockchain I can scan a barcode to see the complete chain of custody. I know where that lettuce came from, what was done to it and, when I’m standing in the grocery store looking at a table of organic lettuce, I know that that lettuce is organic.”

Tune in to this episode to hear how MSPs, vendors and other players in the technology ecosystem can get a handle on blockchain and IoT, and use these emerging technologies to grow their own businesses.

For more on blockchain from Group50, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-06HAFS68gQ&t=30s or visit the website, https://www.group50.com.

For blockchain and IoT consulting, visit https://www.group50.com/supply-chain-blockchain-consulting/ and https://www.group50.com/digital-supply-chain-technology-consulting-practice/internet-things-iot/, and to read more on the topic, see the Group50 blogs at https://www.group50.com/category/blockchain-iot/.

Learn what stackable technologies you can put on your line card and start offering today in this episode of the EmTech Cast, brought to you by CompTIA’s Emerging Technology Community.

“It can be as simple as doing referrals and earning a rebate that’s paid to them over the life of that contract, all the way up to being a reseller or white labeling the complete solution,” said Ted Cole of GPS Insight. In this episode, he sits down with Jim Hamilton, VP of CompTIA Member Communities, to discuss ways the internet of things, big data and artificial intelligence are being incorporated into stacked business solutions.

“Having the opportunity to work with a solution that does incorporate all these technologies is, to me, very exciting,” Cole said. “Most exciting is that they’re channel ready and available today.”

Listen for ways emerging technologies can have a social impact, too. “Fuel efficiency has a tremendous impact on greenhouse gas emissions.” he said. “We stand on a future that’s dominated by technology, and how it’s implemented and used has a tremendous opportunity to impact our world in countless ways.”

For more on Cole and how GPS Insight is stacking emerging technologies, visit https://www.gpsinsight.com/looking-to-partner/.

Emerging technologies like AI and blockchain solve problems in new ways but always seem to be at least a few years from widespread implementation. Technology evangelist James Stanger calls gap between what’s possible and what’s implemented “the future gap.”

“There’s technology waiting in the wings, but we’re just not taking advantage of it,” said Stanger, talking with Community Manager Jim Hamilton in this episode of the EmTech Cast. “Consider this: We’ve been talking about ‘the cloud’ for 10 years and we’ve only seen really strong implementation over the last three to five years.”

In this episode, brought to you by CompTIA’s Emerging Technology Community, Stanger reveals the ways the future gap is tied to fear, budgets and other gaps that plague technology: 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,” Stanger said. “The future gap is the uber cause of a lot of these other gaps.”

Listen in for Stanger’s three ingredients required for emerging tech trifecta, and stay tuned for tips to test out emerging technology solutions without going all in.

Read James Stanger’s full piece on The Future Gap in the latest edition of CompTIA World: https://online.flippingbook.com/view/671008/

And follow on Twitter and LinkedIn: https://twitter.com/jamesstanger and https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesstanger/

We trust that our alarm clocks will go off at the right time, but we don’t trust cars to turn right for us — but why? In this episode of the EmTech Cast, host Jim Hamilton talks with Maddy Martin of smith.ai about automation and trust, and how proper applications of artificial intelligence can free up time in our lives.

“It’s clearing it off my brain and letting the technology do what it needs to do, and trusting that it will come back when I programmed it to,” Martin said. 

Listen for ways AI can create jobs instead of taking them away, how we can program automation to limit the variability of results and even translate languages in real time.

Stay tuned to hear her answer to the question everyone wants answered: “What are some of the biggest opportunities to make money on AI?”

Subscribe to the EmTech Cast to hear all the newest episodes, and learn more about Smith AI at https://smith.ai.

Serial entrepreneur Bob Cooney works with large family entertainment centers — think trampoline parks, roller coasters and bumper cars, and the big adult gaming centers in tourist spots like the Wisconsin Dells and Las Vegas. In Cooney’s experience, emerging technologies like virtual and augmented reality are edging into this space.

“In the second wave of this new VR trend, we’re starting to see more commercial operators in large family entertainment centers,” he said.

There are still big gaps that need to be filled in the market, though. In this episode of the EmTech Cast, Cooney talks with CompTIA Community Manager Jim Hamilton about the hype over VR and AR in consumer technology, what micro-verticals are paying off and how businesses can make money off these emerging technologies.

“The gap, for now, is companies that can put together that technology so it makes sense for an operator to buy it,” Cooney said. “I think there’s opportunity there for other companies to come in as value-added resellers.”

To keep up with Bob Cooney, visit his website, www.bobcooney.com and find his talks online at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrZu7pKpwF72AH7n7Ue49wQ

The way OrionVM offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS) drives costs down so managed services providers can make larger margins and helps MSPs be more than “just another cloud reseller,” said the company’s CEO and cofounder Sheng Yeo.

In this episode of the EmTech Cast, OrionVM CEO and cofounder Sheng Yeo talks with CompTIA communities leader Jim Hamilton about innovation inside commoditization. “We’ve built tech that allows us to sidestep a lot of the scaling problems,” Sheng Yeo said.

They discuss ways OrionVM has used supercomputing infrastructure designs to create a place where customers can buy products and services from the providers they love while managed services providers create stickiness through the unique packages they offer. It’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) done in a whole new way.

Hear how OrionVM leveraged supercomputing technologies to offer significant performance improvements to cloud resellers and pay special attention for tips on how MSPs can gain margin on the infrastructure front. For more on OrionVM, visit www.orionvm.com/why-orionvm/.

Did you know your car probably has a SIM card in it? In this episode of the EmTech Podcast, SAP futurist and innovation evangelist Tom Raftery talks with CompTIA communities leader Jim Hamilton about emerging tech in the transportation sector and how technology is revolutionizing how we move people, goods, and services.

The discussion in this episode of the EmTech Podcast covers big shifts in transportation, including connected cars, the electrification of transportation and the current shift to autonomy. They also talk about where things are going, like companies developing ways you can order a latte, have it delivered to your house and have the car simultaneously offer you a ride to work.

Stay tuned to the end for advice smaller companies can use related to technology and transportation, and the differences Raftery sees between the U.S. and his home country of Ireland.