The partnership builds on a deal Adobe inked with Microsoft in September 2016
Microsoft and Adobe have joined hands to make their respective marketing and sales products more revolutionary. Both companies intend to add more spice to the highly competitive SaaS and Cloud market in the US. The latest partnership in the marketing technology ecosystem comes the same day Adobe unveiled its Adobe Advertising Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud to help marketers in offering best-in-class customer experience across devices and channels.
The new Microsoft-Adobe partnership comes as a potent combination to take on other competitors in the business, including Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM. Just two weeks back, Salesforce and IBM agreed to bring together Einstein and Watson, delivering a unified AI-based customer engagement platform for B2B clients.
Here are five things you should know about the recent announcement from Adobe and Microsoft.
Microsoft Azure as Adobe’s Preferred Cloud Platform
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.
The partnership builds on a deal Adobe inked with Microsoft to deliver its cloud services on Microsoft Azure and that will make Adobe the preferred marketing service for Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Enterprise CRM solution.
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.
New Partnership to Muscle Its Way to Top in SaaS Market
Back in September 2016 at the Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft announced about teaming with Adobe to help enterprise companies embrace digital transformation and deliver compelling, personalized experiences through every phase of their customer relationships.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had said, “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, adding that the partnership “marks a big milestone in our partnership with the leading SaaS services from Adobe coming to Azure.”
Read Also: Adobe Recreates Beethoven’s Magic with Adobe Experience Cloud
By announcing Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service now made available on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform, Adobe intends to offer a unified marketing and sales cloud solution. Businesses that use SaaS suite to run digital marketing and advertising campaigns represent about $1.2 billion of Adobe’s $4.6 billion in revenue last year. Microsoft has been trying to expand Dynamics, its software system for sales people.
Adobe Analytics + Microsoft Power BI: Organizing Business Data More Effectively
By partnering with Adobe, Microsoft intends to merge its Power BI platform into Adobe Analytics. The conjoined semantic data model for understanding and driving real-time customer engagement will standardize how data is structured and vastly expedite the process of gaining insights from massive amounts of data.
This will bring marketers enhanced vision across the enterprise, enabling them to pull behavioral data into Power BI and efficiently visualize the impact of marketing campaigns across segments along the customer journey.
Adobe and Microsoft will Collaborate to Create Shared Data Format
Adobe, at its annual marketing conference, confirmed its plan to collaborate with Microsoft to create a shared data format between Adobe Experience Cloud, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, allowing their SaaS clients to seamlessly integrate their marketing and sales processes. Their first set of joint sales and marketing software solutions will heavily focus on transforming customer experiences for enterprises leveraging shared data format.
Abhay Parasnis, executive vice president and CTO, Adobe said –
“Today’s customers have high standards when it comes to brand interactions. Enterprise companies must deliver exceptional experiences at scale or risk losing customers to competitors,” said. “Bringing together Adobe’s and Microsoft’s sales, marketing and customer intelligence solutions enables brands to better understand and engage with their customers across all touch points.”
“It’s going to enable to customers to go beyond the current (software) silos they have to navigate today,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise division at Microsoft.
Guthrie added, “We believe the combined power of our technologies will allow enterprise businesses to harness their data in new ways, unlocking critical business insights and actionable intelligence.”
Read Also: Adobe Marketing Cloud Partners with Insert to Personalize In-App Mobile Campaigns
Adobe Experience Cloud gives you access to customer profiles, centralized assets, powerful tagging, and an ecosystem of partners and developers to build campaigns, manage your advertising, and gain deep intelligence about your business.
Adobe Advertising Cloud is industry’s first end-to -end platform that makes simple to deliver video, display and search advertising on any screen in nay format. It lets brands and agencies manage TV and digital buying across platforms to targeted audiences.
Collaboration that will benefit B2B customers
Adobe-Microsoft cloud and data partnership is designed to extend its benefits to other leaders in the industry. Partners like AppDynamics, Acxiom, Dun & Bradstreet, Qualtrics, Zendesk, [24]7 and MasterCard are participating with Adobe and Microsoft in the development of this new data model, committed to building applications based on the common language.
Both companies are expected to provide an update on the progress of their Cloud and data sharing platform at Microsoft Build 2017 on May 10-12.
SaaS and Cloud Market Projections for 2017
Enterprises in the US are investing more on ERP and collaboration than ever before. According to the latest report from Synergy Research Group, enterprise SaaS market grew 32% YoY, touching $13 billion in quarterly revenues in Q4 2016. The SaaS market is now more matured and more dominating than public cloud computing services. The report mentions Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, ADP, and IBM, reflecting how big names have performed in 2016. Surprisingly, Synergy Research Group identifies Google and Oracle as the top SaaS vendors that registered highest growth rates.
According to John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group – “There are a variety of factors driving the SaaS market which will guarantee substantial growth for many years to come.”
“Traditional enterprise software vendors like SAP, Oracle and IBM are all pushing to convert their huge base of on-premise software customers to a SaaS subscription relationship. Meanwhile, the relatively new cloud-based vendors like Workday and Zendesk are aggressively targeting the enterprise market and industry giants Microsoft and Google are on a charge to grow their subscriber bases, especially in the collaboration market.”
In another interesting report, 2015 Global Technology Innovation Survey picked Public cloud computing, mobile platforms and apps, IoT, machine-to-machine and data and analytics as the most disruptive technologies till 2020.
B2B Cloud users can finally experience the power of working with data-rich business intelligence collaboration.