Last June, Kansas City struck up a nearly $16bn partnership with Cisco Systems and Sprint to help make that city a lot smarter. How so? By tapping into digital technologies to improve such vital city services as energy, water and transportation.

Oracle Corp. has released a series of new Oracle Cloud services, covering software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) applications.