Adobe, Microsoft, SAP shed more light on Open Data Initiative

In September, a coalition that includes Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announced plans for the Open Data Initiative to provide a complete view of customer experiences in real-time. The companies provided more details on the initiative at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas Wednesday.

Why you should care. The aim is to connect siloed business data by enhancing interoperability between the three companies’ applications and platforms by developing a common data model. Customers can choose where to house the data in a unified data lake. Unilever has now signed on.

New approach to publishing data feeds. The companies said Wednesday that they plan to introduce a new approach in the coming months for publishing, enriching and ingesting initial data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform, activated through Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA, into a customer’s data lake.

“This will enable a new level of AI and machine learning enrichment to garner new insights and better serve customers,” the companies said.

Unilever said Wednesday that it plans to adopt the new data connections to “simplify a previously complex business outcome.”

Partner Advisory Council. The companies also announced a Partner Advisory Council comprised of more than a dozen companies, including Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, InMobi, Sprinklr and WPP.

“Our customers are all trying to integrate behavioural, CRM, ERP and other internal data sets to have a comprehensive understanding of each consumer, and they’re struggling with the challenges of integrating this data,” said Stephan Pretorius, CTO of WPP. “We’re excited about the initiative Adobe, Microsoft and SAP have taken in this area, and we see a lot of opportunity to contribute to the development of the ODI.”

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Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media's Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.