Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP Partner to Launch Open Data Initiative

The CEOs of Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP introduced the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite conference opening today in Orlando, Fla. The goal of the initiative is to empower companies to derive more value from their data and deliver world-class customer experiences in real time.

The Open Data Initiative is a common approach and set of resources based on three guiding principles:

• Every organization owns and maintains complete, direct control of all their data.
• Customers can enable artificial intelligence-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioral and operational data.
• A broad partner ecosystem should be able to 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 govern their data and support privacy and security initiatives.

"Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP are partnering to reimagine the customer experience management category," said Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe. "Together we will give enterprises the ability to harness and act on 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 a common data lake service on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. This unified data store will allow users to choose their own development tools and applications.

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

• Unlock and harmonize siloed data;
• Bi-directionally move transactional, operational, customer or IoT data to and from the common data lake;
• Create data-powered digital feedback loops;
• Enable their security and privacy compliance initiatives; and
• Build and adopt intelligent applications that natively understand data, relationships, and metadata spanning multiple services from Adobe, SAP, Microsoft, and their partners.

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