Adobe Summit 2019: Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP Announce New Details on Open Data Initiative

Day two of Adobe Summit in Las Vegas featured an appearance from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP announced new details of their Open Data Initiative (ODI), which was originally announced in September 2018.

The three companies plan to deliver a new approach for publishing, enriching, and ingesting initial data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform (the release of which was announced this week)—activated through Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Office 365, and SAP C/4HANA—into a customer’s data lake. In so doing, the three companies aim to enable next-level AI and machine learning enrichment to provide new insights to customers.

Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP also announced plans for a Partner Advisory Council consisting of companies including Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, InMobi, Sprinklr, and WPP. These companies hope the ODI will help them drive value for their customers.

Nadella emphasized the importance of breaking down data siloes while speaking during the morning keynote. “The most important asset that everyone in this room has is the data that you have which is yours, except it’s sometimes locked up in siloes. The partnership that [Adobe and Microsoft] formed with SAP was to say OK, if we unlock this data and really help each of you enrich this data so that all of what you do across the enterprise—how you connect with customers or how you manage your supply chain or how you even drive an initiative like sustainability—can be driven by all of the data,” he told the audience.

“An AI-first company is not a company that just takes, say, data in their CRM system and makes their customer management better; you have to take all of the data you have, irrespective of which system it is in, and make your customer interaction better,” he continued. “That ability to continuously optimize your outcomes using all of your data is really key and the only way to do that is by really having initiatives like ODI unlock the power of the data.”

Nadella also discussed what he sees as the key ingredients for businesses of all stripes to be successful: a sense of purpose and culture. “What are the necessary conditions to get your strategy and products right? One’s a sense of purpose, and the other is culture. When I joined Microsoft in the early ’90s, we used to talk about our mission as a PC in every home and every desk. By the end of the ’90s, we more or less had achieved that objective, at least in the developed world, and ever since we felt, what’s that next big mission? When we talk about our mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, it’s not just a set of words,” he told the audience. “But then culture is so important because if you want to keep reinventing yourself you need that learning culture.…I realized that if we can move from being know-it-alls to learn-it-alls and maintain that posture, that probably more than anything else can help us.”