Open Data Initiative Announced by SAP, Microsoft and Adobe

On Monday, Adobe Microsoft and SAP introduced the Open Data Initiative (ODI) at the Microsoft Ignite conference. The trilateral coalition between three of the world’s most influential enterprise software companies tackles one of the key challenges all enterprises face: siloed data. Only by unlocking and harmonizing data can companies increase the velocity at which they provide great customer experiences and solve customer needs in real time.

Enterprises should be able to do this with the data that they control but the reality looks different. This makes this initiative so remarkable and important. It gives commitment from SAP, Microsoft, and Adobe to allow data to be exchanged and enriched across systems, making data a renewable resource that flows into intelligent applications, enabling a single view of the customer, and delivering true end-to-end customer journeys.

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
Customers can enable AI-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioral and operational
A broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open and extensible data model to extend the

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.

“Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are partnering to reimagine the customer experience management category,” said Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe. “Together we will give enterprises the ability to harness and action massive volumes of customer data to deliver personalized, real-time customer experiences at scale.”
“Together with Adobe and SAP we are taking a first, critical step to helping companies achieve a level of customer and business understanding that has never before been possible,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Organizations everywhere have a massive opportunity to build AI-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated workflows and, ultimately, improved business outcomes.”
“Microsoft, Adobe and SAP understand the customer experience is no longer a sales management conversation,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. “CEOs are breaking down the silos of the status quo so they can get all people inside their companies focused on serving people outside their companies. With the open data initiative, we will help businesses run with a true single view of the customer.”

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.

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