Microsoft And Adobe Team Up In Unprecedented Cloud Partnership

While Microsoft termed a partnership with another software giant Adobe Partnership in the Azure Cloud to help businesses transform customer engagement, there was one common enemy in sight and that’s Salesforce.

Under the new partnership, Adobe’s business tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Document Cloud to Microsoft Azure; Microsoft’s Cloud service. According to the post on Microsoft’s website, “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.”

According to a Business Insider report citing a spokesperson in Microsoft, Now, Azure is the “preferred cloud platform” for Adobe’s products, which is a big win for Microsoft: While the Azure deal isn’t exclusive, as a Microsoft spokesperson confirms, it had previously hosted many parts of its cloud products on the competing Amazon Web Services cloud.

In turn, Microsoft will make Adobe Marketing Cloud the “preferred marketing service” for its Dynamics 365 product, which is widely used by companies to help track sales leads and relationships with their customers. Now, Microsoft will officially recommend that those companies use Adobe Marketing Cloud if they want to use that data to run a marketing campaign, alongside forthcoming new data integrations…….. Microsoft doesn’t have a marketing software competitor, and Adobe doesn’t have a sales software play.

While this partnership provides Microsoft with Cloud Marketing tools it needs, it also gives Adobe an edge which is that they can leverage on Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform for its Marketing Cloud data to compete with Salesforce Einstein; the newly announced Salesforce AI platform.

This all comes as Oracle through its Founder and now CTO Larry Ellison that it was announcing plans of its own to take on the likes of Amazon. He declared Amazon’s lead over and that Oracle was ready to bring some real competition to Amazon’s Web Services (AWS); Amazon’s version of Azure which is the biggest in the world at least by revenue. According to USA Today, The business opportunity for cloud computing immense. Roughly one-fourth of large North American and European companies use public cloud platforms from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM — about a $20 billion market. By 2020, it will be $64 billion, according to a new report from Forrester Research. Oracle,

“We’re in the middle of a generational change — from on-premise computing — to super data centers called clouds,” said Ellison, who highlighted the company’s aggressive push into cloud infrastructure services this year. On Tuesday, Ellison is scheduled to deliver a second keynote speech, in which Amazon is targeted.

But does this seem likely? Well it depends on how you see it. Oracle is the leading database software provider in the world and while only 6% of corporations worldwide are spending on cloud solutions specifically for databases and analytics, this seems to be a huge market with big potentials. The figure is expected to jump to 30% by 2020 as big business migrate to the technology for competitive reasons. Collectively, IDC pegs those markets at $43 billion today. Read more on what Ellison said last week on USA Today.

This won’t be an easy fight though and as Larry Ellison noted, Amazon still leads. As of July this year when they reported their second quarter earnings, Amazon as a company was valued at $365.8b while its Cloud division raking in $2.89 billion in revenue compared to Oracle’s $969m first fiscal quarter ended Aug. 31. The good news though here is that both saw their revenues jump 59 percent in the reported quarters.

So there you go people, 2017, looks like the Cloud war years and let’s not forget that Dell’s record $67b acquisition of Cloud Company EMC.

This won’t be the first time that Microsoft will be shocking the tech world by announcing rare partnerships. Earlier this year, they announced that SQL will now run on Linux in a move seen as Microsoft endearing itself to more platforms and developers. It has also announced a range of its once exclusive services like Cortana coming to other platforms as well.