The Linux Foundation’s joint Development Foundation (JDF) is teaming up up with AWS, Genesys and Salesforce to create an open source data model that standardizes data interoperability across cloud applications. They’re calling it the Cloud Information Model (CIM). 

The CIM is meant to tackle the challenge of cloud computing and creating data models. The foundation explained that data models force developers to build, test and manage custom code in order to translate data across systems.

According to the foundation, the new open data model aims to reduce the complexities of integrating data across cloud applications by providing data interoperability guidelines to point-of-sale systems, digital marketing platforms, contact centers or CRM centers. 

Instead of creating custom code, developers can adopt and extend the CIM within days so that they can create data lakes, generate analytics, train machine learning models and build a single view of the customer, the foundation explained.

“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.”

Applications that are currently compatible with CIM include AWS Lake Formation, which helps customers move, store, catalog and clean data from different sources to set up a data lake; Salesforce’s Customer 360, which provides instant access to consistent, reconciled customer data across Salesforce apps; and Genesys Cloud and Genesys AI.