Microsoft, Adobe, SAP to expand Open Data Initiative, which unifies data across their platforms, by adding partners, starting with WPP, Sprinklr, and 10 others
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Open Data Initiative launched in September 2018 as a joint promise from Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP to pool customer data across their platforms onto Azure-hosted infrastructure. It was the culmination of a deliberate courtship: Adobe had already named Azure its preferred cloud in 2016, and the two deepened the relationship in 2017 with cross-cloud integrations tying Teams to Adobe Sign.
Adding WPP, Sprinklr, and ten other partners turns the initiative from a three-vendor pact into an ecosystem play — the first test of whether outside agencies and marketing-software vendors will build on shared data plumbing rather than proprietary connectors.
First-order effects
- WPP and Sprinklr gain direct access to unified customer data spanning Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP systems, letting them build services on top of the trio's combined footprint instead of stitching exports together per client.
- Microsoft strengthens its position as the hosting layer: every new partner's unified-data workload runs on Azure, converting a standards announcement into cloud consumption.
Second-order effects
- Adobe's Experience Cloud gets a broader data spine just as enterprises weigh it against rival marketing stacks — partners joining ODI effectively commit to the Adobe-Microsoft-SAP triangle for campaign and commerce data.
- Agencies and martech vendors not yet in the program face pressure to join or justify why their clients' data should stay siloed, making membership itself a competitive signal in agency pitches.
Third-order effects
- If the partner roster keeps growing, the industry moves toward a model where interoperability is granted by the platform owners who host the shared layer — the moat shifts from owning the data to controlling where unified data lives.
- A durable Microsoft-Adobe-SAP data axis would push other enterprise software vendors toward either counter-alliances or compatibility layers of their own, reshaping how marketing, ERP, and productivity data are exchanged.
The trend: Enterprise software vendors are shifting from closed data silos to jointly governed shared data layers, with the platform hosting the unified store capturing the compounding value.