Demonstrating its leadership and vision in the Cloud ERP market, Oracle today announced the latest updates to Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud. The updates enable organizations of all sizes to enhance productivity, reduce costs and improve controls by introducing both product innovations and industry-focused solutions. "Oracle continues to extend its lead in the Cloud ERP market with powerful new innovations to support the changing demands placed on finance and operations teams," said Rondy Ng, senior vice president, Oracle Applications Development. "Integrating intelligent assistants and machine learning capabilities into Oracle ERP Cloud enables customers to reduce the number of mundane--but important--tasks for their employees. This improves productivity and accuracy, enhances business insight and decision making and helps free up employees for strategic, creative and fulfilling work."

Today's topics include Oracle adding artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to its software, and Pulumi launching a Team Edition of its infrastructure-as-code platform. Oracle on Oct. 22 at its annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco revealed some new artificial intelligence updates to Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud and Enterprise Performance Management Cloud. Like past improvements, these all extract data-driven insights from enterprise data stores, helping companies capitalize on new market opportunities and increase profitability. However, according to Oracle Senior Vice President of Applications Product Development Steve Miranda, "The main news [Oracle is] announcing is happening in three main categories. First … machine learning is going across the board. You'll see more bots in [Oracle's] interfaces, for one thing. This will allow you to become more conversational and interactive with the apps."

AWS has become the largest, most dominant public cloud provider in the world, thanks to relentless innovation of new services; secure, globally available infrastructure; and the flexibility to deploy resources and managed services at a moment's notice. Unfortunately, these services are not always cheap. Although AWS' consumption-based billing model has the potential to be efficient, it can also lead to tremendous waste. Except for a few new services, like Lambda, AWS doesn't charge for operational usage, but it does charge for resource consumption. The bill for an individual EC2 instance is the same whether it runs at 95% utilization or 5%.

Artificial Intelligence is dubbed as the future and is expected to play a huge role in the HR industry. There are various startups and companies across the globe, which have launched products in the similar segment. Email software like'Zoho mail'; companies like'Workcompass' which came out with a performance management software and is doing very well. The target audience would be "Organisations with more than 100 employees". Most of the employee assessment today is done by managers, that leads to complete focus on "the person," with the possibility of bias and complexities because of reasons including their personal "traits" or behaviours.

Recently I heard the strains of Bach's Sonata No 3 in G Minor (BWV 1029) Allegro, and as I pondered on the richness, harmony and texture of the sounds. I recalled I had heard this before listening to a live broadcast of the same piece of music on the BBC. It was Alissa Firsova's fantastic arrangement of the final movement of Bach's Viola da Gamba sonata in G minor performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andrew Litton on 14th August 2010 at the Royal Albert Hall. I pulled out my phone and loaded Shazam I wanted to find out who had performed this particular piece. Shazam did its thing and in seconds I had the details of Glenn Gould Remastered Columbia Album, of course it had to be.