Microsoft, Adobe, SAP offer new details on joint Open Data Initiative

During this week's Adobe Summit, Microsoft and Adobe released new details about the Open Data Initiative, the result of a partnership between the two enterprises and SAP.

The stated goal of the partnership is to help "customers create new connections across previously siloed data, more seamlessly garner intelligence, and ultimately better serve brands with an improved view of their customer interactions," according to a Microsoft press release.

Updated details at the Adobe Summit indicate that the companies intend to offer new ways to publish or ingest data feeds from Dynamics 365, Office 365, SAP C/4HANA, Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform.

The three enterprises are assembling a Partner Advisory Council, including a dozen companies including EY, Hootsuite, Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Cognizant, Change Healthcare, and others.

During the event, Unilever highlighted how it plans to use the Open Data Initiative to breakdown siloes between its data and feed it into Adobe in a bid to reduce plastic packaging waste.

The update follows up on an announcement in September at Ignite 2018 that the three enterprises would be collaborating on the Open Data Initiative. At the time, the initial announcement focused heavily on Azure but in the latest round there is no mention of Azure and instead references to a "customer-chosen data lake," perhaps for some sort of political reasons.