A triumvirate of some of the world’s tech titans — Microsoft, Adobe and SAP — have banded together and pooled their resources for a project dubbed Open Data Initiative (ODI).
Image: Microsoft
The project, an email sent to SDN — Scitech and Digital News showed, the triumvirate have introduced was crafted to help companies extract “more value from data and deliver world-class experiences in real-time.”
Apparently, the ODI takes off from the buzzword nowadays in the digital world that data is the new oil.
Similarly, companies across the world have also been adopting digital transformation, a prime component of which is bringing customer experience to new heights.
Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and SAP’s Bill McDermott unveiled the ODI during the recent Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando, Florida, United States.
Image: UCreative.com
Adobe, Microsoft and SAP have long been partners, now they have joined forces for the ODI to give “their mutual customers a platform to eliminate data silos and enable a single view of the customer, helping companies to better govern their data and support data privacy and security initiatives.”
One component of the project includes enabling companies to “more easily use AI (artificial intelligence) 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.
What makes leveraging AI with more ease is that the ODI provides the ability to better connect data across organizations.
Christian Lim, COO of Microsoft Philippines, said the triumvirate’s new venture will also be helpful for local companies who are exploring how to make more effective and responsible use of data.
According to the Country COO of Microsoft Philippines, Christian Lim, this new venture will likewise be helpful for local companies who are exploring how to make more effective and responsible data’s use.
Image: Wikipedia
“In the Philippines, more and more companies are starting to leverage their data and turning that data into a capital asset. From banks to BPOs (business process outsourcing), these companies sit on a lot of data, and they are now beginning to bring that data together, look at insights and patterns, and most importantly, help their people make the best business decisions.
“The Open Data Initiative is a crucial step towards effectively harnessing data to provide better customer service and experience,” Lim emphasized.
To deliver on the Open Data Initiative, the three partners are enhancing inter-operability 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. This unified data store will allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.
Lim added:
“The Open Data Initiative provides a massive opportunity to build AI-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated workflows, and, ultimately, improved business outcomes.”
Adobe, Microsoft and SAP launched the ODI on September 24 during the Ignite conference.
ODI is based on three guiding 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.
- A broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open and extensible data model to extend the solution.
What the three giant organizations’ officials said:
Narayen — “Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are partnering to re-imagine the customer experience management category. 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,” Narayen said.
Nadella — “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. Organizations everywhere have a massive opportunity to build AI-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated workflows and, ultimately, improved business outcomes.”
McDermott — “Microsoft, Adobe and SAP understand the customer experience is no longer a sales management conversation.. CEOs are breaking down the silos of the status quo so they can get all people inside their companies focused on serving people outside their companies. With the open data initiative, we will help businesses run with a true single view of the customer.”
What the ODI provides to companies:
- Unlock and harmonize siloed data to create new value.
- Bi-directionally 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 their 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 partners.
Already, giant companies such as The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever, and Walmart have voiced support and excitement about the ODI.
Barry Simpson, CIO, Coca-Cola:
Image: Coca-Cola United Kingdom
“This initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP is an important and strategic development for the Coca-Cola System. Our digital growth plans centered around our customers are fueled by these platforms and open standards. A more unified approach to the management and control of our data strengthens our ability to support our growth agenda and our ability to satisfy security, privacy and GDPR compliance requirements. The industry needs to follow these leaders.”
Jane Mora, CIO, Unilever:
Image: Wikipedia
“Every day, 2.5 billion people use a Unilever product in over 190 countries around the world. The Open Data Initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP is an important undertaking that will help us re-imagine customer experience management by bringing together data across our entire organization to build more direct, meaningful relationships with consumers in real time.”
Clay Johnson, EVP and Enterprise CIO, Walmart:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
“We’re excited about the Open Data Initiative and the value it will unlock for Walmart. With greater ability to connect and harness the power of our data, we can enhance the associate experience and create entirely new ways to serve our customers online and in our stores.” (EKU)