Industry leaders

Shantanu Narayen, CEO at Adobe

, Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, and Bill McDermott, CEO at SAP, have teamed up to help customers connect data across their organisations, find insights and deliver intelligent services with AI.

This week the three CEOs introduced the Open Data initiative at the

Microsoft Ignite conference

in a bid to empower companies to derive more value from their data and

deliver better customer experience

in real-time.

The initiative hopes to empower their mutual customers by following three guiding principles: Every organisation owns and maintains complete, direct control of their data; customers can enable AI-driven business processes to derive insights; and intelligence from unified behavioural and operational data.

The Open Data initiative hopes to eliminate data silos and enable a single view of the customer, helping companies better govern their data and support privacy and security initiatives.

A common data model

To deliver on this, 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 a unified data store which will allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.

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.

Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP said: “Microsoft, Adobe and SAP understand the customer experience is no longer a sales management conversation. 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.”