Adobe Unveils Microsoft Partnership, Tighter Cloud Integrations

Featured

Adobe unveiled a partnership with Microsoft, a move designed to help companies better manage their marketing, sales and services to enhance customer engagement throughout the buyer’s journey.

Announced at the Adobe Summit in London, the partnership includes the integration of Microsoft's Dynamics CRM with the Adobe Marketing Cloud, positioning users to leverage all of their customer engagement data for every aspect of the buying funnel — including customer retention.

While the move is in a positive direction for both companies and their customers, the partnership could have a minimal impact on B2B teams due to the different firmographics leveraging each tool, according to David Raab, Principal at Raab Associates.

"Most Dynamics CRM users are small-to-mid-size businesses, while the Adobe Marketing Cloud is really best suited for big companies," Raab noted in an interview with Demand Gen Report. "This means only a relatively small number of people will want to integrate the two products."

Adobe also announced updates to the integration between its Marketing Cloud and Creative Cloud, intending to simplify the process of using Big Data while creating content for marketing and sales campaigns.

"The tighter integration of Marketing Cloud and Creative Cloud will affect more people, since pretty much everybody uses Creative Cloud," Raab added. "Anything that reduces friction is a good thing."

The newer integration makes Adobe Experience Manager available to users, designed to help accelerate the time between content creation and campaign deployment. Other features include:

  • The ability to sync, store and share content across marketing solutions and Creative Cloud;
  • The ability to manage responsive websites and other content developed with Creative Cloud tools across any platform; and
  • New capabilities allowing users to monitor and respond to viewer engagement with video content and ads during live streams.

"Adobe and Microsoft are creating the industry’s first large-scale solution for connecting the customer experience across all touch points," said Brad Rencher, SVP and General Manager for Digital Marketing Business at Adobe."We are making it possible for the long-held promise of the customer-centric enterprise to become a data-driven reality."