Microsoft, Adobe, SAP Form Open Data Initiative Partnership

Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announced on Monday (Sept. 24) the introduction of the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite conference being held this week.

In a press release, the companies said that together, the three longstanding partners are reimagining customer experience management (CXM) by enabling companies to get more value from their data, given that in today’s digital world, data is a company’s most valuable asset. At the same time, companies are struggling to get a complete view of interactions with customers and operations, creating the need to combine all of the data in one place.

With companies around the world using software from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP, they decided to team up to create the Open Data Initiative. According to the companies, the initiative is a common approach and set of resources for customers based on these 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; and a broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open and extensible data model to extend the solution. The main focus is to remove data silos to give companies a single view into all aspects of their customers.

“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 action massive volumes of customer data to deliver personalized, real-time customer experiences at scale.”

To make the Open Data Initiative a reality, the three companies 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 model will provide for the use of a common data lake service on Microsoft Azure, the companies said. This unified data store will allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.

“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.”

During the Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft also announced it is getting rid of passwords by supporting password-less logins via its Microsoft Authenticator app for hundreds of thousands of Azure Active Directory-connected apps. It has also launched the Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise, enabling developers to make voice-activated Cortana apps for the business community, according to reports.