Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company’s Ignite 2018 keynote with some major news this morning. Bringing the CEOs of Adobe and SAP on stage, Satya Nadella announced that the three companies had teamed up to create the Open Data Initiative, a new partnership aiming to give customers more control over their data.
The Open Data Initiative aims to help organizations create more value from important customer information that is often managed by third party providers. “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, Microsoft explained. “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.”
With the Open Data Initiative, Microsoft and its partners will enhance interoperability between Microsoft Dynamics 365, Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform, and SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA. This will be done through a common data model that will allow a large partner ecosystem to “unlock and harmonize siloed data to create new value,” Microsoft explained today.
Such a partnership would have been absolutely far-fetched a couple of years ago, but this is a necessary step for building the intelligent applications of tomorrow. “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,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP.
