Monday Morning Impact – December 19

CompTIA: Strong Tech Employment Numbers Counter Layoffs

Technology companies added workers for the 24th consecutive month and tech occupations expanded throughout the economy in November, according to the latest “Tech Jobs Report” from CompTIA, which is based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report reveals that tech companies added 14,400 workers last month. Tech sector employment has increased by 207,200 this year.

“The hotter-than-anticipated tech jobs report confirms there are still many more employers hiring tech talent than shedding it,” said Tim Herbert. “It’s certainly premature to dismiss concerns over the health of the economy, but this should be a reassuring sign for the tech workforce.”

Tech occupations in all industry sectors grew by 137,000 positions, pushing the unemployment rate for tech workers down to 2%, from 2.2% in October.

November hiring by technology companies was broad-based across occupation categories, led by IT services and custom software development (+8,100). Employment growth also occurred in data processing, hosting, and related services (+4,100), other information services, including search engines (+2,100) and computer and electronic products manufacturing (+1,900).

Employer job postings for future tech hiring fell back in November, but still totaled nearly 270,000. Openings for software developers and engineers accounted for about 28% of all tech jobs postings. Demand for IT support specialists, systems engineers, IT project managers and network engineers was also solid.

CompTIA’s analysis also reveals that 30% of all tech jobs postings are for positions in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, or in roles that require emerging tech skills.

Channel Impact^®
The tech sector adds workers for the 24th straight month, with tech occupations grow throughout the economy. We can all use a little bit of good news on the economic front.

AWS Announces Amazon Security Lake

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has rolled out is new “Amazon Security Lake,” a service that automatically centralizes an organization’s security data from cloud and on-premises sources into a purpose-built data lake in a customer’s AWS account so customers can act on security data faster.

The service manages data throughout its lifecycle with customizable data retention settings, converts incoming security data to the efficient Apache Parquet format, and conforms it to the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) open standard to make it easier to automatically normalize security data from AWS and combine it with dozens of pre-integrated third-party enterprise security data sources. Security analysts and engineers can use Amazon Security Lake to aggregate, manage, and optimize large volumes of disparate log and event data to enable faster threat detection, investigation, and incident response to effectively address potential issues quickly, while continuing to utilize their preferred analytics tools.

After setup and connections to selected data sources, the service automatically builds a security data lake in a customer-selected region, which can help customers meet regional data compliance requirements. After customers choose their data sources, Amazon Security Lake automatically aggregates and normalizes data from AWS, combines it with third-party sources that support OCSF (an open standard), and optimizes it into a format that is easy to store and query.

“Customers must be able to quickly detect and respond to security risks so they can take swift action to secure data and networks, but the data they need for analysis is often spread across multiple sources and stored in a variety of formats,” said Jon Ramsey, vice president for Security Services at AWS. “Customers tell us they want to take action on this data faster to improve their security posture, but the process of collecting, normalizing, storing, and managing this data is complex and time consuming,”

Amazon Security Lake is available in preview today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Dublin), with availability in additional AWS Regions anticipated soon.

Channel Impact^®
A purpose-built security data lake helps organizations aggregate, manage, and analyze log and event data to enable faster threat detection, investigation, and incident response.

Dialpad Leverages AI in New Customer Intelligence Platforme

Dialpad has announced its new AI-powered customer intelligence platform, which brings together contact center, sales, voice, meetings, and messaging with integrated real-time AI capabilities to analyze conversations, automate workflows and deliver predictive insights that enable value-driven action. Built to unify customer service, sales communication, and employee collaboration, the new platform is the culmination of years of research and development into speech recognition and natural language processing, coupled with technological acquisitions in semantic search and digital contact center solutions.

“Every company is looking for new ways to engage with customers for faster sales cycles, easier expansions, and higher retention to adapt amid today’s economic uncertainty and the hybrid working world – and old software and tools founded on legacy systems aren’t built to provide the insights companies need,” said Craig Walker, CEO and Founder of Dialpad. “Dialpad’s Ai-Powered Customer Intelligence Platform is industry defining and will lead businesses of all sizes into the future, helping customers unlock tremendous advances in collaboration, productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenue for long-term growth.”

The platform serves all Dialpad products, pertaining to Contact Center, Sales, Voice, Meetings, and Messaging.

Channel Impact^®
The platform is designed to unify the contact center services with communications to harness the benefits of AI together with cloud for instant deployment, scale, and flexibility.