• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 24, 2018

Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announced the Open Data Initiative Monday, intended to give brands one common view of a customer’s data, as well as solve other enterprise data challenges. The three have sent an open invitation for other companies to join and help redefine the future of data and experiences.

The goal is enable the real-time flow of information between companies, from behavior and transaction to finance and operations. Some of these processes support advertising.

Based on the three principles, the core focus of the Open Data Initiative is to eliminate the data silo, provide a single view of customer data, help companies to better govern their data, and support privacy and security initiatives.

With the ability to connect data across an organization, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP executives see an advancement of artificial intelligence in the near future supported by advanced analytics for real-time insights. For example, Adobe debuted a virtual assistant for analytics on Monday in order to give brands increased access to their own data, providing insights they didn’t know they need.

In addition to advertising, the companies say it will impact CRM, ERP, commerce, sales product use and more.

The Open Data Initiative is based on three principles: Every organization owns and maintains control of all its data; customers can enable AI-driven business processes to gain insights and intelligence from unified behavioral and operational data; and a broad partner ecosystem will become able to leverage an open and extensible data model that extend the solution.

Adobe also released 50 semantic schemas as open-source that are available on GitHub, licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 license, helping to ensure XDM operations as industry standards.