Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announce the Open Data Initiative

The CEOs of Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP introduced the Open Data Initiative (ODI) at the Microsoft Ignite conference. Together, the three longstanding partners are reimagining customer experience management (CXM) by empowering companies to derive more value from their data and deliver world-class customer experiences in real-time.

In today's world, data is a company's most valuable asset. However, many businesses struggle to attain a complete view of their customer interactions and operations, because they are unable to connect information trapped in internal silos. At the same time, important customer information also resides in external silos with intermediary services and third-party providers, limiting a company's ability to create the right connections, garner intelligence and ultimately extract more value from its own data in real-time to better serve its customers.

Companies around the world use software and services from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP to run product development, operations, finance, marketing, sales, human resources and more. Today, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are joining forces to empower their mutual customers with the Open Data Initiative, which is a common approach and set of resources for customers based on three guiding principles:

• Every organization owns and maintains complete, direct control of all their data.
• Customers can enable AI-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioral and operational data.
• A broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open and extensible data model to extend the solution.

Based on these principles, the core focus of the Open Data Initiative is to eliminate data silos and enable a single view of the customer, helping companies to better govern their data and support privacy and security initiatives. With the ability to better connect data across an organization, companies can more easily use AI and advanced analytics for real-time insights, "hydrate" business applications with critical data to make them more effective and deliver a new category of AI-powered services for customers.

To deliver on the Open Data Initiative, the three partners are enhancing interoperability and data exchange between their applications and platforms-Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA --through a common data model. The data model will provide for the use of a common data lake service on Microsoft Azure. This unified data store will allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.

With the Open Data Initiative, companies will be able to:

• Unlock and harmonize siloed data to create new value
• Bi-directionally move transactional, operational, customer or IoT data to and from the common data lake based on their preference or needs
• Create data-powered digital feedback loops for greater business impact, while also helping to enable their security and privacy compliance initiatives
• Build and adopt intelligent applications that natively understand data, relationships, and metadata spanning multiple services from Adobe, SAP, Microsoft and their partners

Technology leaders at top retail and consumer products companies, such as The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever and Walmart, have expressed support and excitement about the Open Data Initiative.