Microsoft is partnering with Adobe and SAP on the Open Data Initiative which will enable data to be exchanged and enriched across systems, making it a renewable resource that flows into intelligent applications.
With a complete view of data, the possibilities for improved customer experiences, operational efficiency and business improvements are almost endless. For users of solutions from these three providers this represents a great opportunity.
Data is an organisations most valuable asset however, many businesses struggle to create a complete view of their customer interactions and operations, because they are unable to connect information trapped in different departments. At the same time, important customer information also resides with intermediary services and third-party providers. This limits an organisation’s ability to create the right connections, apply intelligence and ultimately extract more value from its own data in real time.
Organisations around the world use software and services from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP to run product development, operations, finance, marketing, sales, human resources and more. Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are joining forces to empower their mutual customers with the Open Data Initiative, which is a common approach and set of resources for customers based on three guiding 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 and extensible data model to extend the solution.
With the ability to better connect data across an organisation, companies can more easily use AI and advanced analytics for real-time insights, empower business applications with critical data to make them more effective and deliver a new category of AI-powered services for customers.
“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. “Organisations everywhere have a massive opportunity to build AI-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated workflows and, ultimately, improved business outcomes.”
How it works
To deliver on the Open Data Initiative, the three partners 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. The data model will provide a common data lake service on Microsoft Azure. This unified data store will allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.
With the Open Data Initiative, companies will be able to:
- Unlock and harmonise siloed data to create new value.
- Move transactional, operational, customer or IoT data to and from the common data lake based on their preference or needs.
- Create data-powered digital feedback loops for greater business impact, while also helping to enable security and privacy compliance initiatives.
- Build and adopt intelligent applications that natively understand data, relationships and metadata spanning multiple services from Adobe, SAP, Microsoft and their partner.