Microsoft and Adobe Unite Forces, Targeting Salesforce with Groundbreaking Cloud Partnership

In a remarkable move, tech titans Microsoft and Adobe have formed a strategic alliance with a clear aim in their sights – their mutual competitor, Salesforce. The partnership has been grandly called ‘Partnership in the Azure Cloud to Help Businesses Transform Customer Engagement.’

This ambitious collaboration permits Adobe’s robust business tools, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, and Document Cloud, to be integrated with Microsoft Azure, which is Microsoft’s premium cloud service. As stated on Microsoft’s website, “Azure provides Adobe with a trusted, global cloud and a potent data platform for intelligent services, equipped with comprehensive machine learning and cognitive capabilities in the Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite and SQL Server. Microsoft will now endorse Adobe Marketing Cloud as its favored marketing service for Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition, offering customers an extensive, powerful marketing service for Microsoft’s future generation of intelligent business applications.”

A Business Insider report asserts that, “Azure is the preferred cloud platform for Adobe’s product suite.” This announcement is a significant milestone for Microsoft, even though the Azure deal is not exclusive. It is important to note that many aspects of Adobe’s products were previously hosted on Amazon Web Services cloud, a major rival to Microsoft’s Azure.

The collaboration also includes Microsoft officially recommending Adobe Marketing Cloud as the primary marketing service for its Dynamics 365 product, which is broadly used by businesses to manage sales leads and customer relationships. This means that Microsoft will advise companies to use Adobe Marketing Cloud if they wish to utilize their data to run a marketing campaign. This news points to a synergistic future, as Microsoft does not have a marketing software competitor, and Adobe does not develop sales software.

Thanks to this partnership, Microsoft gains much-needed cloud marketing tools, while Adobe gains a considerable advantage in terms of leveraging Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform for its Marketing Cloud data. This gives them a significant edge against Salesforce Einstein, the newly unveiled Salesforce AI platform.

Meanwhile, Oracle’s Founder and current CTO, Larry Ellison, announced ambitious plans of their own to compete with Amazon. He confidently declared that Oracle is all set to challenge Amazon’s dominance over Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s version of Azure, which currently boasts the highest revenue globally.

The rapidly expanding business opportunity for cloud computing paints an exciting picture. Approximately one-fourth of large North American and European companies are already using public cloud platforms from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM — amounting to a $20 billion market. Forecasts indicate that by 2020, this market will have ballooned to $64 billion, as reported by Forrester Research.

Larry Ellison’s focus on this shift was clear when he said, “We’re in the middle of a generational change — from on-premise computing — to super data centers called clouds,” highlighting Oracle’s aggressive adoption of cloud infrastructure services this year.

Does Oracle stand a chance against the established leaders? The answer depends on how you interpret the data. Oracle is the top database software provider worldwide, and the small 6% of global corporations investing in cloud solutions primarily for databases and analytics suggest a vast untapped market ripe with potential. Experts predict that this figure will skyrocket to 30% by 2020 as more businesses adopt cloud technology for competitive reasons. This results in an estimated market potential of $43 billion today, according to IDC.

The fight, however, won’t be easy. As of July earlier this year, Amazon reported its company valued at $365.8 billion, with its Cloud division raking in a staggering $2.89 billion in revenue — dwarfing Oracle’s $969 million for its fiscal quarter ended August 31. But an encouraging sign is that both companies reported a whopping 59 percent increase in their revenues for their respective reported quarters.

As we gear up for a competitive 2017, the cloud wars are heating up, with every major player aiming to capture a slice of the expanding pie, exemplified by Dell’s record $67 billion acquisition of cloud company EMC.

Microsoft’s partnership with Adobe is not its first unexpected alliance. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that SQL will run on Linux, a move interpreted as an attempt to endear itself to more platforms and developers. It seems Microsoft intends to paint a picture of cooperative growth, indicating more surprising partnerships may await us in the future.