Exclusives

Adobe, Microsoft and SAP teamed up to introduce an initiative they said was designed to enable their customers to derive more value from their data.

The Open Data Initiative, unveiled by the CEOs of the three longstanding partners Sept. 24 at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, was designed to reimagine customer experience management (CXM) by empowering companies to do much more with their data and also “deliver world-class customer experiences in real-time,” the companies said in a joint announcement.

“The data that is available in every company around the customer is super-rich” today and includes behavioral data from the web and mobile devices and services, as well as Internet of Things (IoT) information, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Ignite attendees. Therefore, “clearly this is a big data opportunity,” he noted.

But there is a “small data challenge,” he said, explaining: “All of this data is now trapped in silos, many of them internal,” but there’s also “external silos” with intermediary services and third-party providers.

He added: “The real challenge is to be able to bring all this data together, so that companies are in control.”

The Open Data Initiative will solve that challenge, he said at the conference. The initiative offers a “common approach and set of resources for customers based on three guiding principles,” the companies said in a news release. First, every organization owns and maintains complete, direct control of all their data. Second, customers can enable artificial intelligence (AI)-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioral and operational data. And third, a broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open and extensible data model to extend the solution, they said.

Based on those 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,” according to the companies. They added: “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.”

To deliver on the initiative, the three partners said they’re 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, they said.

Already , “technology leaders at top retail and consumer products companies,” including The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever and Walmart, “expressed support and excitement” about the initiative, according to Adobe, Microsoft and SAP.

More information is available via Microsoft, Adobe and SAP.

Microsoft also used its annual IT event to underscore the need for increased IT security and released a variety of new security programs and products. They included Microsoft Secure Score, a dynamic report card that it said assesses Microsoft 365 customer environments and “makes recommendations that can reduce breaches up to thirtyfold,” and Microsoft Authenticator, which it said, “helps make secure sign-on easier for workers with features like password-free login.”

Microsoft also advanced its commitment to “democratize access to AI” via a new AI for Humanitarian Action program that it said was “aimed at harnessing the power of AI for disaster recovery, helping children, protecting refugees and displaced people, and promoting respect for human rights.”