Unilever to Reduce Plastic Packaging, Wastage with ODI

The Open Data Initiative (ODI), which was earlier announced by Adobe, Microsoft and SAP, is gaining momentum and traction as new customers show their support.

Originally announced in September last year by the three vendors, ODI aims to help companies to share data across the vendors' platforms and unlock new insights locked in data silos by using a common data model. 

At the recent Adobe Summit, the three companies said that they would deliver a new approach for publishing, enriching and ingesting data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform, activated through Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Office 365, and SAP C/4HANA, into a customer's data lake. They reasoned that this would help companies to use machine learning and AI to gain new insights previously hidden.

Unilever agrees. One of the first global brands to support ODI, it announced its efforts to bring together disparate customer, product and resource data and use AI-driven insights to help reduce their plastic packaging and encourage consumer recycling.

To explore other use cases in industries, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP unveiled the Partner Advisory Council. Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, InMobi, Sprinklr and WPP have joined the Council.

“Our customers are all trying to integrate behavioral, CRM, ERP and other internal data sets to have a comprehensive understanding of each consumer, and they’re struggling with the challenges of integrating this data,” said Stephan Pretorius, CTO of WPP.

“We’re excited about the initiative Adobe, Microsoft and SAP have taken in this area, and we see a lot of opportunities to contribute to the development of the ODI.”