Managing Editor
Oracle OpenWorld kicked off yesterday with the first of two keynotes from Oracle founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison. The big news coming out of that keynote was the "world's first truly autonomous cloud," intended to automate many of the manual patches that often leave an organization's data vulnerable to a breach. Today, the focus was on Oracle's cloud applications with a keynote from development EVP Steve Miranda. The audience heard from such iconic companies as Hearst, Ferrari and Hilton about their successes with Oracle's ERP, HR, supply chain and customer experience applications.

But the big news for finance professionals came from the ERP/EPM keynote, presented by development leaders Rondy Ng and Matt Bradley. The latest product and machine learning updates to Oracle ERP Cloud can help organizations take advantage of innovations in artificial intelligence, digital assistants, natural language processing, and the Internet of Things: