Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Barb Darrow.

 Anyone who has ever met an Oracle  ORCL 0.45%  sales person knows from a high-pressure sale.  For these people much of their rich compensation comes in bonuses earned when they hit particular quota numbers. So it’s not at all surprising that Oracle, now all-in on cloud computing, is telling its sales people to push cloud and structuring incentives so that cloud sales are richly rewarded while sales of traditional on-premises software licenses, not so much.

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

While the rest of the tech media marvelled at the world’s first seven nanometre chips unveiled by IBM earlier this week, the Armonk giant has quietly pushed out a couple of impressive cloud announcements alongside it.  IBM – who, let us not forget, wants to be seen as a cloud-first organisation – has announced the availability of NVIDIA Tesla K80 dual-GPU accelerators on bare metal cloud servers. In other words, it provides supercomputing powers to the SoftLayer cloud without the need for companies to expand their existing infrastructure.

Grazed from IBM.  Author: PR Announcement.

An alliance led by IBM Research (NYSE:IBM) today announced that it has produced the semiconductor industry’s first 7nm (nanometer) node test chips with functioning transistors.  The breakthrough, accomplished in partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung at SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY Poly CNSE), could result in the ability to place more than 20 billion tiny switches — transistors — on the fingernail-sized chips that power everything from smartphones to spacecraft.

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Matt Weinberger.

Hey, did you see that there’s a new patch for that game out? Yeah, it introduces a new bug, so make sure you saved your game to the cloud before you grab it. Thanks to the smartphones, tablets, and laptops we’re increasingly carrying around all day, computer jargon is entering our daily speech at an alarming rate. But these words started somewhere else.

From bugs to cloud to to mice to spam, here’s where we get 11 common computer terms. The term "bug," meaning a flaw in a piece of software, gained popularity after a moth flew into the insides of the Harvard Mark II supercomputer in 1946. "Booting," meaning to start a device up (think "rebooting") comes from "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

Red Hat (RHT) launched its global Certified Cloud and Service Provider program this week, which replaces the company’s existing Certified Cloud Provider Program. The new program is designed to expand the company’s cloud ecosystem to provide support for additional distributors, managed service providers and partners selling hybrid cloud-centric services. Red Hat said the Certified Cloud and Service Provider program would allow cloud providers to grow their private cloud solutions with Linux-based infrastructure and platform as service solutions, according to the announcement.

“Much like enterprise IT itself, the world of cloud computing is constantly evolving, especially with the growing promise of hybrid cloud approaches and Linux container-based architectures,” said Michael Ferris, senior director of Business Architecture at Red Hat, in a statement…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Cloud vendor DigitalOcean today announced that it has raised $83 million in a Series B round of funding led by Access Industries and with the participation of Andreessen Horowitz. The new funding, according to Ben Uretsky, co-founder and CEO of DigitalOcean, will help finance his company’s growth, buying new servers and investing in the facilities and assets that are needed to move the company forward.

"We’re trying to look two to three years ahead to understand what the capital needs of the business are," Uretsky told eWEEK. "When you go out to raise capital, what you’re doing is balancing the valuation against the time horizon." To date, DigitalOcean has raised $123.4 million in venture capital, with a $3.2 million seed round of funding in July 2013 and a $37.2 million Series A round in March 2014…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

MSPs build trust with customers and prospects by providing transparency in their approach to cloud data storage and cloud-based file sharing. Because many businesses are cautious about making the transition to cloud computing. When customers move their data and applications to the cloud, they’re relinquishing some of their control. Of course, many find this disturbing. In this environment, how can you alleviate stress and establish trust?

Transparency

One critical component of building trust is transparency. Merely claiming your services are secure and reliable isn’t enough. Transparency gives customers information about not just what you can promise, but also how you’re going to fulfill that promise. How can you achieve transparency? How can you tailor your cloud approach to build trust?…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

It’s easy to despair about the cloud computing industry and its seemingly endless navel-gazing. It often seems that the cloud crowd is more interested in internecine warfare than actually helping customers realize the benefits of this emerging platform. The prime example of this tech narcissism is the ongoing industry slugfest regarding private/public/hybrid cloud and what the “right” solution is.

Out in the real world of enterprise IT, however, organizations are adopting cloud computing with enthusiasm, which was displayed in full force at London’s Cloud World Forum in June. One of the strengths of this conference is how it’s able to entice end users to present case studies of their actual experience; this is a refreshing change from other cloud events that seem to serve primarily as opportunities for vendor marketing departments to pitch their products…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jim O’Reilly.

Public cloud adoption has grown significantly over the past few years, as even the most skeptical IT pros admit the technology is right for certain use cases. Spending on public cloud services is expected to exceed $127 billion in 2018, up from $56.6 billion in 2014, according to industry analyst group IDC.

But, even as adoption grows, many organizations still question whether they can use public cloud to run all mission-critical workloads. The answer, however, depends on several factors. To protect data, a business’ most mission-critical applications are kept close. In fact, by law, certain data must be protected…