At Wednesday's Adobe Summit, Microsoft, SAP and Adobe announced they were getting down to the brass tacks of their Open Data Initiative (ODI) by adding new members.
Microsoft announced the ODI project at its Ignite IT Pro conference in September with SAP and Adobe. At the Adobe Summit, the three partners announced other companies were joining ODI through a newly created partner advisory council.
The first 12 companies to join the ODI Partner Council are Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, Inmobi, Sprinklr, and WPP. Even with the heavyweight status of Microsoft, SAP and Adobe, ODI will need to continue to expand its partner ecosystem in order to flourish.
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The thought behind forming ODI was to create a common framework to help customers create new connections across their siloed data in order to put that data into a customer-chosen data lake, which could include Microsoft Azure. The unified data lake allows customers to pick their development tools and applications in order to build and deploy services.
Over the coming months, the three companies plan to announced a new approach for publishing and ingesting data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform, which will be activated via activated Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA, into a customer’s data lake.
The end result, according to the three partners, will be a "new level AI and machine learning enrichment to garner new insights and better serve customers."
At the Adobe Summit, Unilever, which is a mutual customer of Microsoft, SAP and Adobe, is demonstrating how it plans to blend together customer, product and resource data and use AI-driven insights to help reduce its plastic packaging. By breaking down its data silos, Unilever expects to be able to tie inventory and plastics data into Adobe data to enhance customer experiences and encourage customer participation in recycling.