The CEOs of tech giants Adobe, Microsoft and SAP together introduced the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite conference this week, providing a common approach and set of resources for customer experience.
The initiative is guided by three principles:
- Every organisation owns and maintains complete, direct control of all their data.
- Customers can enable AI-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioural and operational data.
- A broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open an extensible data model to extend the solution.
According to the companies, the aim 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, support privacy and security initiatives, and more easily use AI and advanced analytics for real-time insights.
“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 operationalise the Open Data Initiative, the three vendors will enhance 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, which will provide for the use of a common data lake service on Microsoft Azure. Customers will then be able to use their own choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.
Barry Simpson, chief information officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said the partnership is an “important and strategic development for the Coca-Cola System”.
“Our digital growth plans centred around our customers are fuelled by these platforms and open standards. A more unified approach to the management and control of our data strengthens our ability to support our growth agenda and our ability to satisfy security, privacy and GDPR-compliance requirements. The industry needs to follow these leaders.”