CompTIA

**Vendor neutrality was not a marketing position adopted later. It was the founding condition**, and it distinguished the association from proprietary vendor programmes from day one. The name changed to the Computing Technology Industry Association by the late 1980s as the scope widened past dealerships into education and workforce development.

The A+ certification arrived in the early 1990s, and the idea behind it is worth stating because it is easy to take for granted now: a credential that says you can do the work, rather than that you can operate one company's products. Network+, Security+ and the rest followed the same logic. More than 3.5 million certifications have been awarded.

**Read that against the Cisco entry on this timeline and the two halves of an argument appear.** Cisco's CCNA, CCNP and CCIE created the vendor-defined competency ladder, and every vendor on this site with a certification track is working from that template - including the four whose official training this site's author delivers. CompTIA is the other answer to the same question: that a technician's competence is a property of the technician, not of a supplier relationship. Both models are still standing, and most working engineers hold credentials of both kinds.

There is a detail here that matters to anyone who teaches. **CTT+, the Certified Technical Trainer credential, was vendor-neutral certification for the act of instruction itself** - acquired from the Chauncey Institute and built with the IT Training Association and the Computer Education Management Association. It was **retired on 31 October 2023**. Existing holders remain certified. There is no direct replacement, which means the one widely recognised credential for teaching technology, independent of what was being taught, no longer exists.

**And then the part that is not settled.** In November 2024, H.I.G. Capital and Thoma Bravo agreed to acquire the CompTIA brand and its certification and training business. The transaction closed in early 2025 and split the organisation in two: the certification business now operates **for profit** under private-equity ownership, while the membership-based 501(c)(6) nonprofit association separates and continues. Forty-two years of operating as a non-profit ended.

The company's position is that nothing material changes - the certifications remain ANSI accredited and vendor-neutral, and the ownership brings resources to expand. Practitioners in its own instructor community were less certain, and their objection is specific rather than sentimental: **the asset being bought is neutrality, and neutrality is the one thing that cannot be bought without raising the question of whether it survived the purchase.** One put it as having more faith in a certification body run as a non-profit, because non-profits answer to a mission and companies answer to a number.

**This page does not resolve that, because it is not yet resolvable.** The assurance is on record and so is the doubt, and the only honest thing to say is that the answer arrives over years, in whether the exam objectives keep describing the job or start describing somebody's product.

Worth noting who the buyer is: **Thoma Bravo now appears in four entries on this timeline** - holding Sophos, holding LANDESK before it became Ivanti, taking Ping Identity private twice and combining it with ForgeRock, and now this. On a page about lineage, the recurring name is not a vendor at all.