A news item from Microsoft at Adobe Summit today indicates that they will engage in a strategic partnership which will feature the integration of Adobe Marketing Cloud Solutions with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
According to Microsoft’s Kirill Tatarinov (EVP, Microsoft Business Solutions):
Helping our customers reinvent productivity and business processes is one of our top priorities. Partnering with Adobe enables us to deliver a comprehensive set of customer engagement processes to enterprise customers to help them be more productive and better engage with their customers
In terms of concrete outcomes, it is likely that Adobe solutions will continued to be enabled on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Adobe Campaign and Experience are already certified for Azure, and Adobe’s Primetime service for live event streaming has an Azure backbone.
Further development is also expected on a connector that will allow Adobe Analytics to appear in Microsoft’s Power BI. This will allow users to see Analytics data as well as other business data in a single “pane of glass” interface.
Longer term, customers of these tools/platforms will benefit from superior customer experiences as complementary capabilities between the two solutions allow for end-to-end customer management. Strategically, this reflects a continued openness of Microsoft to partnership with firms traditionally considered competitors, if not downright enemies, e.g. Office for iPad, running Linux virtual machines on Azure, etc.
