Monday Morning Impact – July 21

Published On: July 20, 2025Categories: Buzz

CompTIA: Tech Hiring Activity Outpaces Expectations

The unemployment rate for technology occupations dropped below 3% in June as companies added tech professionals to their payrolls, according to CompTIA, an industry association based in suburban Chicago.

Tech occupation employment, which encompasses companies in all industry sectors, increased by an estimated net new 90,000 workers for the month, according to CompTIA’s analysis of monthly data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The tech unemployment rate fell back below three percent to 2.8%, compared to 3.4% in May. The tech unemployment rate remains consistently lower than the benchmark national rate.

Tech sector companies reduced staffing by a net 7,256 positions across all job role types in June. The tech manufacturing sector accounted for the largest share of job losses, mirroring the broader uncertainty in U.S. manufacturing activity. Following their common practice, the BLS issued an upward revision to last month’s tech sector employment figures, boosting the gain by 400% to a net new 7,600 workers added to payrolls.

“Tech employment showed surprising strength for the month given recent expectations,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer, CompTIA. “It’s worth pointing out there is more to tech hiring than AI. The data continues to confirm employer hiring activity across many tech talent domains.”

Active employer job listings for tech positions reached 455,341 in June, with 47% of the total (211,924) newly added last month, according to CompTIA analysis of Lightcast job posting data. Demand was strongest for software developers and engineers, systems engineers and architects, tech support specialists, cybersecurity engineers and architects, and network engineers and architects.

The AI Hiring Intent Index component of CompTIA’s Tech Jobs Report continues to show the relative growth of employer hiring for an increasingly wide range of positions that now require some degree of AI fluency skills. Job listings for this category of hiring were up 153% for the month compared to the same period in 2024. Hiring for dedicated AI specialists, such as AI architects or AI engineers, is also growing rapidly but remains limited to certain types of employers.

Employers continue to look at skills-based hiring to expand the candidate pool to fill tech staffing needs. Nearly 50% of June job postings did not specify a requirement for a four-year degree. These jobs are in a range of technology disciplines, including network support, tech support, database administration, network and systems administrators and web developers.

Channel Impact^®
The data show a sense of optimism in an industry that is still seeing substantial reductions-in-force at the company level.

TD Synnex Acquires Apptium to Accelerate Everything-as-a-Service Offerings

TD Synnex announced that it has acquired Apptium, a software development company and provider of a cloud commerce platform. Prior to the acquisition, Apptium acted as a key partner and enabler to the distributor’s StreamOne orchestration platform, and the combination of this technology, and industry and technical expertise is expected to further advance the platform’s development.

“Bringing this technical expertise to TD Synnex allows us to execute on our strategy and continue investments in serving our customers as well as the incoming customers of Apptium,” said Patrick Zammit, the distributor’s CEO. “Through this platform we will strengthen support for our ecosystem partners and expand our addressable market over the next several years.”

Founded in 2014 and based in Reston, Virginia, Apptium brings a team of IT professionals and centers of excellence across three continents, serving brands from more than 20 countries across the Enterprise, B2B and B2C markets. The company has developed a platform-as-a-service offering that enables companies to adopt and implement marketplaces that promise accelerated implementation, streamlined management, and accelerated time to revenue over a single pane of glass.

In addition to underpinning StreamOne, Apptium also brings to the table a robust billing/subscription management platform.

“This transaction is fantastic news both for the vendors and customers of TD Synnex and those of Apptium, as it will drive greater value in our platform and depth of offerings,” said Rick Kapani, Founder and CEO, Apptium. “Moreover, it is a testament to our team members’ hard work and dedication to making Apptium into the businesses it is today.”

As a wholly owned subsidiary, Apptium will continue to function as a separate organization to preserve and sustain its culture and its product roadmap. Founder Rick Kapani will continue to lead the business as General Manager and Senior Vice President, reporting to Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Sergio Farache. Apptium will also continue serving its existing customers via the Apptium Cloud Commerce Platform.

Channel Impact^®
The addition of Apptium and its platform capabilities is expected to enable TD Synnex partners to accelerate time to revenue, and modernize and manage their service offerings – including technology goods, as well as agentic AI, SaaS, IaaS and XaaS capabilities. The combined entity has expertise in the technology, communications, services and managed solutions industries, as well as digital service delivery.

Rubrik to Acquire Predibase to Bolster Agentic AI

Rubrik, Inc. has entered into an agreement to acquire Predibase to accelerate agentic AI adoption from pilot to production at scale. The combined company expects to enhance simplicity in models and data, resulting in improved accuracy, lower costs, better performance, and automated data governance.

Founded by AI technologists from Google and Uber, the Predibase platform is designed to fine-tune open source models into production-ready solutions, combining a proprietary post-training stack for customizing models with an optimized inference engine. The platform includes a turbo serving engine along with LoRA eXchange, an open source system for deploying personalized models at scale. Teams can support different users, use cases, and departments without ballooning infrastructure costs.

“What the Predibase team has achieved with model training and serving infrastructure in the last few years is nothing short of remarkable,” said Bipul Sinha, CEO, Chairman and Co-Founder of Rubrik. “Together, Rubrik and Predibase will drive agentic AI adoption around the world and unlock immediate value for our customers.”

Integration of the two companies is expected to secure and deploy GenAI applications that Rubrik is doing today with Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and Google Agentspace.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Completion of the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.

Channel Impact^®
The combination is expected to provide enterprise AI teams access to GenAI model and serving layer in addition to Rubrik’s ready-to-use, secure and governed data lake.

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