To accelerate digital transformation, organizations in every industry are modernizing their on-premises technologies by adopting cloud-native applications. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), global spend on cloud computing will grow from $147 billion in 2019 to $418 billion by 2024. Almost half of that investment will be tied to technologies that help companies deliver personalized customer experiences.
One major challenge of this shift to cloud computing is that applications are typically created with their own data models, forcing developers to build, test, and manage custom code that’s necessary to map and translate data across different systems. The process is inefficient, delays innovation, and ultimately can result in a broken customer experience.
Announcing the Cloud Information Model
It is in the spirit of removing these barriers to innovation that Amazon Web Services, Genesys, and Salesforce have come together with the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation (JDF) to form the Cloud Information Model (CIM), an open-source data model that standardizes data interoperability across cloud applications. The publication of CIM is enabled by MuleSoft’s open source modeling technology, providing multiple file formats to make it easy to adopt CIM with varying applications. By easily integrating data in the cloud, developers can build new products that deliver connected and personalized customer experiences.
“Bringing the Cloud Information Model under JDF will offer a neutral home for the open-source community,” Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at The Linux Foundation. “This allows for anyone across the community to collaborate and provide contributions under a central governance model. It paves the way for full community-wide engagement in data interoperability efforts and standards development, while rapidly increasing adoption rate of the community.”
How the Cloud Information Model Works
The CIM reduces the complexities of integrating data across cloud applications by providing standardized data interoperability guidelines to connect point-of-sale systems, digital marketing platforms, contact centers, CRM systems and more. Developers no longer need to spend months creating custom code. Instead, they can adopt and extend the CIM within days so that they can create data lakes, generate analytics, train machine learning models, build a single view of the customer and more.
CIM Compatible Applications
The founding members already offer products and technologies for companies to use with the CIM. AWS Lake Formation helps customers move, store, catalog and clean data from different sources to quickly set up a secure data lake. Amazon Redshift powers mission critical data warehouses for business intelligence, predictive analytics and real-time streaming analytics. Customers can leverage the JSON or SQL scripts to create CIM-compatible schemas for their AWS data lakes and data warehouses.
Salesforce’s Customer 360 is a set of platform services powered by CIM. Customer 360 provides customers with a single source of truth by providing instant access to consistent, reconciled customer data across Salesforce apps. MuleSoft, the provider of the leading integration and API platform, now natively supports CIM to enable the discovery of CIM data types, allowing users to easily create CIM-compatible APIs and integrations. CIM is available today in MuleSoft’s Anypoint Exchange, its public marketplace of connectors, templates and APIs.
Using Genesys Cloud and Genesys AI, businesses can seamlessly interact with their customers across all channels, including voice, chat, email, text and social. By combining engagement data from Genesys with data from CIM-compatible sources, businesses gain an even more complete perspective of their customers and employees in real-time, resulting in deeper levels of personalization.
How to Contribute to CIM
Anyone is invited to contribute to the CIM–including developers, technology vendors and brands. To learn more and get started, visit www.cloudinformationmodel.org. If you would like information on joining the project, please reach out to membership@cloudinformationmodel.org.
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