Adobe Moves Cloud Services Onto Microsoft Azure

Satya Nadella’s drive to turn Microsoft into a powerful cloud player continues with the news that Adobe has agreed to deliver its cloud services on the Azure platform.

Adobe will make Azure its “preferred cloud platform” for its three core services, namely Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud and the company will also be the preferred marketing service for Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CRM solution.

Partnership Deal

Adobe will make use of Microsoft’s “comprehensive machine learning and cognitive capabilities in Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite and SQL Server.” Adobe had adopted a cloud model back in 2013.

“Business leaders in every industry are focused on how to better engage their digital customers, wherever they are,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “Together, Adobe and Microsoft are bringing the most advanced marketing capabilities on the most powerful and intelligent cloud to help companies digitally transform and engage customers in new ways.”

“Customers today expect a well-designed, personalised and consistent experience every time they engage with a brand,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe. “Adobe and Microsoft will bring together the cloud horsepower and end-to-end capabilities brands need to design and deliver great digital experiences.”

As part of the partnership deal, both Adobe and Microsoft are working together to create standardised data models for their marketing and business applications. Both firms intend to make these data models extensible to enterprise customers, as well as third-party developers and partners, in order to foster innovation and development.

Cloud Success

Azure is proving to be a success for Microsoft as it struggles with a moribund PC market and a retreat from consumer mobiles.

Back in the summer Microsoft revealed that cloud revenue had helped the firm beat Wall Street’s expectations and close its last fiscal quarter of 2016 with £16 billion in revenues and £2.4 billion profit. Revenue from Microsoft Azure had grown more than 100 percent year over year, as the company said usage of the platform had doubled.

And sometime next year Microsoft will finally deliver its Azure Stack, Microsoft’s platform for building private clouds that operate in the same way its public cloud operates.

Microsoft changed the way the Azure Stack operates in the summer when it announced that it would only be able through certified hardware partners, rather than letting customers run the software on any hardware they want to.

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