Microsoft Corp. today revealed more details about its plans for the Open Data Initiative it launched with its partners Adobe Inc. and SAP SE during its Ignite IT Pro conference last September.

At the time the ODI was launched, the companies said the idea was to make it easier for their joint customers to move data among the various services they offer. This would be done by standardizing on a common data format and by moving data from different silos into a single customer-chosen data lake.

The plan is to standardize on Microsoft’s Common Data Model. That will provide a unified schema and semantics to give companies a single view of their customers, the partners said at the time.

Other components of ODI are likely to include the Azure Data Lake and various other Microsoft cloud services, such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, Azure Machine Learning and Azure Data Warehouse. Adobe and SAP both said Azure will become their “preferred” cloud platform, though customers are free to choose other options if they wish.

Now Microsoft, together with Adobe and SAP, says it wants to expand the program by bringing in some more partners. They include the likes of Accenture Plc., Amadeus IT Group SA, Capgemini Services SAS and others, which are joining a new ODI Partner Advisory Council that aims to accelerate development of the initiative.

In addition, the three companies said that in the coming months they’re planning to deliver a new approach for publishing, enriching and ingesting data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform, activated through Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA, into a customer’s data lake.

The announcement builds on Adobe’s launch of a new service Tuesday called the “Account Based Experience,” which integrates data from its Marketo Engage product with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Sales and LinkedIn, to create richer profiles of their customers.

The updates are certainly promising, but analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said all of the talk is still hot air as far as he’s concerned.

“Making statements and announcements is easy, but building software is hard,” Mueller said. “I remain a skeptic until I see it and believe it. There’s a lot of potential, but also a lot of hard work, questions and architectures to be designed, implemented and run.”

Image: Microsoft