The Open Data Initiative announced last year jointly by Adobe, Microsoft and SAP was a welcome initiative from the industry major players and one that is important for B2B marketing

They have now shed some light on how they propose to enhance the current process of integrating customer data by delivering a new approach for publishing, enriching and ingesting initial data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform into the customer’s data base. We are told this will be activated through Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Office 365, and SAP C/4HANA. T

Will this help achieve the stated objective of achieving the ‘single customer view’ and all the advantages that come with that for sales, marketing but also GDPR and privacy management and security? It is certainly a huge step in the right direction but a genuine single customer view that can work intelligently within a marketing automation platform is still a long way from reality for most large companies, particularly those with multiple product and service streams with overlapping customer segments.

But shared platforms standards and protocols that allow integration of feeds from all data feeds is a great starting point. The huge advantages promised by marketing automation may just be around the corner – fingers crossed