A couple of weeks ago Microsoft, Adobe and SAP announced their Open Data Initiative. While this, as far as we know, is only a statement for now, it of course has attracted some interest based on that it is three giants in the IT industry who have agreed on something – mostly interpreted as agreed to oppose Salesforce.com.
Forming a business ecosystem among players in the market is not new. However, what we usually see is that a group of companies agrees on a standard and then each one of them puts a product or service, that adheres to that standard, on the market. The standard then caters for the interoperability between the products and services.
In this case its seems to be something different. The product or service is operated by Microsoft based on their Azure platform. There will be some form of a common data model. But it is a data lake, meaning that we should expect that data can be provided in any structure and format and that data can be consumed into any structure and format.
In all humbleness, this concept is the same as the one that is behind Product Data Lake.
The Open Data Initiative from Microsoft, Adobe and SAP focuses at customer data and seems to be about enterprise wide customer data. While it technically also could support ecosystem wide customer data, privacy concerns and compliance issues will restrict that scope in many cases.
At Product Data Lake, we do the same for product data. Only here, the scope is business ecosystem wide as the big pain with product data is the flow between trading partners as examined here.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 