Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announced the Open Data Initiative during last year’s Microsoft Ignite conference with the intent of creating standards that would assist customers in moving their data between the companies’ services more easily. Now the companies are looking to expand the program. At this week’s Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, they demonstrated how Unilever is effectively leveraging a new common data standard. They also announced the formation of a partner advisory council as a first step toward making the Open Data Initiative available to other companies.

The first council partners include Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, InMobi, Sprinklr and WPP.

According to TechCrunch, “having this common data schema means that the customer doesn’t have to figure out ways to transform the data from these vendors and can simply flow all of it into a single data lake that then in turn feeds the various analytics services, machine learning systems and other tools that these companies offer.”

“The intent of the companies joining forces was really to solve a common customer problem that we hear time and time again, which is that there are high-value business data tends to be very siloed in a variety of different applications,” Microsoft exec Alysa Taylor told TechCrunch. “Being able to extract that data, reason over that data, garner intelligence from that data, is very cost-prohibitive and it’s very manual and time-consuming.”

SAP exec Abhay Kumar says the alliance will initially focus on areas such as market intelligence, sales intelligence and services intelligence.