At Ignite 2018, Microsoft, Adobe and SAP have jointly announced a new alliance called Open Data Initiative with the goal of making consumer data available across platforms. As part of the initiative, the three companies will form a single data model meant to help businesses seamlessly migrate their customers" data from one platform to another.
Open Data Initiative will focus on removing data silos that pose a challenge to moving data between different ecosystems due to the lack of a standard structure. The initiative also aims to authorize a streamlined view of customer data in order to help companies manage those pieces of information with privacy and security in mind.
Microsoft noted that companies will be able to better leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics for real-time insights and offer a fresh category of AI-enabled services to customers once data silos are eliminated.
Regarding the business opportunities provided by AI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said:
Organizations everywhere have a massive opportunity to build AI-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated workflows and, ultimately, improved business outcomes.
The common data model to be created as part of the Open Data Initiative is intended to help facilitate data exchange between Microsoft"s Dynamics 365, Adobe"s Experience Cloud and Experience Platform, and SAP"s C/4HANA and S/4HANA platform. The single data model will also be hosted on Microsoft Azure.
The latest partnership extends Microsoft"s long alliances with Adobe and SAP. The software giant partnered with Adobe in 2016 to bring Creative Cloud to Azure and also teamed up with SAP earlier that year to deliver HANA on the same cloud platform.