Adobe to deliver its cloud services on Microsoft Azure; Microsoft to make Adobe its preferred marketing service for Dynamics 365 Enterprise

Microsoft and Adobe are joining forces in the cloud. On Monday at the Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft and Adobe announced plans for a strategic partnership to help enterprise companies embrace digital transformation and deliver compelling, personalized experiences through every phase of their customer relationships.

Together, the two companies will enable businesses to dramatically strengthen their brands with solutions from Microsoft Azure, the Adobe Marketing Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

“Adobe and Microsoft have had a great partnership, we have innovated together, we have partnered to really drive the success of our customers over a variety of technology platforms,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at Ignite in Atlanta. Monday’s announcement “marks a big milestone in our partnership with the leading SaaS services from Adobe coming to Azure.”

Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe, speaking at Ignite, said that most people still know Adobe for what is has done with Photoshop and PDF, but that “We have completely rethought how in the cloud we can reimagine the creative process, as well as documents.”

A few years ago, he said, “We started to think about business transformation and digital disruption. And we felt there was an incredible opportunity to also target marketers as being the last bastion of people for whom technology was not brought to bear.” In that journey, he said, the Adobe Marketing Cloud was created.

“As we thought about how to evolve all of our clouds and we thought about the next phase of innovation for this, it was critical to us that we had to think about things like global scale,” trust and compliance, and perhaps “most important … machine learning and intelligence,” Narayen said.

With the partnership, Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud. Azure provides Adobe with a trusted, global cloud and a powerful data platform for intelligent services, including comprehensive machine learning and cognitive capabilities in Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite and SQL Server.

Microsoft will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition, giving customers a powerful, comprehensive marketing service for Microsoft’s next generation of intelligent business applications.

To learn more about the partnership, read the news release.

Photo by Brian Smale.