ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 24, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On Monday,
the CEOs of Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and SAP
(NYSE: SAP) introduced the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft
Ignite conference. Together, the three longstanding partners are
reimagining customer experience management (CXM) by empowering
companies to derive more value from their data and deliver
world-class customer experiences in real-time.
In today's world, data is a company's most valuable asset.
However, many businesses struggle to attain a complete view of
their customer interactions and operations, because they are unable
to connect information trapped in internal silos. At the same time,
important customer information also resides in external silos with
intermediary services and third-party providers, limiting a
company's ability to create the right connections, garner
intelligence and ultimately extract more value from its own data in
real time to better serve customers.
Companies around the world use software and services from Adobe,
Microsoft and SAP to run product development, operations, finances,
marketing, sales, human resources and more. Today, 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 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.
Based on these 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. 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.
"Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are partnering to reimagine the
customer experience management category," said Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe. "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."
"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.
"Organizations everywhere have a massive opportunity to build
AI-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated
workflows and, ultimately, improved business
outcomes."
"Microsoft, Adobe and SAP understand the customer experience is
no longer a sales management conversation," said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. "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."
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 — 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.
With the Open Data Initiative, companies will be able to:
- 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
Technology leaders at top retail and consumer products
companies, such as The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever and Walmart,
have expressed support and excitement about the Open Data
Initiative.
"This initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP is an important
and strategic development for the Coca-Cola System," said
Barry Simpson, chief information
officer at the Coca-Cola Company. "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."
"Every day, 2.5 billion people use a Unilever product in over
190 countries around the world," said Jane
Moran, CIO, Unilever. "The Open Data Initiative from Adobe,
Microsoft and SAP is an important undertaking that will help us
reimagine customer experience management by bringing together data
across our entire organization to build more direct, meaningful
relationships with consumers in real time."
"We're excited about the Open Data Initiative and the value it
will unlock for Walmart," said Clay
Johnson, executive vice president and enterprise chief
information officer, Walmart Inc. "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."
More information is available at
https://www.microsoft.com/opendatainitiative,
https://www.adobe.com/experience-platform/open-data-initiative.html
and http://www.sap.com/opendatainitiative.
About Adobe
Adobe is changing the world through
digital experiences. For more information,
visit www.adobe.com.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft)
enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud
and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and
every organization on the planet to achieve more.
About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application
software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and
industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to
storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and
organizations to work together more efficiently and use business
insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP
applications and services enable more than 404,000 business and
public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously,
and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.