Adobe wanted to help its customers understand how people engage with the content created through the Adobe Creative Cloud, so it built the Adobe Experience Cloud to integrate data analytics with content, audience, and campaign management. By partnering with Microsoft to connect Experience Cloud with Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365, Adobe can offer businesses a 360-degree customer view and the tools to create, deliver, and manage digital experiences—backed by a globally scalable cloud platform.
“To create, deliver, and manage targeted content at scale can involve overwhelming volumes of data. Adobe and Microsoft share ideas about how to help our customers meet that challenge.”
Tim Waddell, Director of Product Marketing for Microsoft Solutions, Adobe
While you read this, millions of professionals are using Adobe services to create the digital experiences that are changing the way the rest of us consume content. They use Photoshop to design and edit images, Illustrator to create graphics, InDesign to lay out pages, and Acrobat to format documents. In short, for the last 35 years, when it comes to multimedia content creation, Adobe leads.
The important stuff
That’s not enough for Adobe. They know the important stuff has changed, and content creation is only the first step. Now businesses must understand how people engage with content, and on what devices. Then, they have to figure out how to reach users—and determine when they’re ready to engage.
Adobe has responded by linking web analytics, content management, audience profiling, and campaign orchestration in Adobe Experience Cloud. Aligned with Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud, Experience Cloud gives businesses the tools they need to deliver personalized content to any audience, track it from engagement to conversion, and use the data to generate insights and shape action.
“We want to help our customers integrate compelling content with data analytics to support holistic, personalized digital experiences at scale,” says Nik Shroff, Director of Microsoft Solutions at Adobe.
A strategic partnership
That’s why in September 2016, Adobe announced that it would align Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Adobe Document Cloud with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
As Experience Cloud became the fastest growing part of the company’s business, Adobe could see that to reach the next phase of its vision, it would need a global infrastructure, on-demand scalability, and the capability to store, manage, and analyze big data. It was time to look for a strategic partner.
Adobe strategists liked the trajectory that Microsoft has set for Azure in terms of global infrastructure, platform, security, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. “Microsoft has deep capabilities in areas of keen interest to us, especially around data and AI services,” says Shroff.
Ultimately, both companies saw that they shared a common vision of how enterprises can deliver digital content. “To create, deliver, and manage targeted content at scale can involve overwhelming volumes of data,” says Tim Waddell, Director of Product Marketing for Microsoft Solutions at Adobe. “Adobe and Microsoft share ideas about how to help our customers meet that challenge.”
The first joint solutions
In March 2017, Adobe launched its first set of joint solutions with Microsoft. Adobe is offering Experience Cloud, consisting of Marketing Cloud, Advertising Cloud, and Analytics Cloud, on the Azure platform. It aligns Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Campaign with Dynamics 365, and makes it easy to operate Microsoft Power BI dashboards in Analytics Cloud.
Adobe Experience Manager with Azure and Dynamics 365
Many online retailers use Adobe Experience Manager content management to power e-commerce websites. Now that Experience Manager runs on Azure, when potential customers open a page or fill out a form on a site, the data syncs from Experience Manager to Dynamics 365.
Marketers can then turn the data into a new set of leads, and build workflows to engage those leads and move them through the marketing funnel. When leads are handed off to sales, sellers can look in Dynamics 365 to see every message and marketing touch they’ve ever engaged, so they can initiate sales discussions without missing a beat.
“By connecting Experience Manager with Azure and Dynamics 365, we’ve created a clean, connected set of experiences that help organizations streamline and scale marketing and sales processes,” says Waddell.
Adobe Campaign, Adobe Sign, and Dynamics 365
Adobe customers use Adobe Campaign, a set of solutions in Marketing Cloud, to personalize, manage, monitor, and automate cross-channel marketing campaigns. By linking Adobe Campaign and Adobe Sign to Dynamics 365, businesses can infuse campaign orchestration with sales and customer relationship data.
That gives marketers access to vital sales data while sellers get a unified customer profile and insight into every marketing interaction. Businesses can give marketers and sellers the familiar tools and actionable insights they need to increase productivity, reduce time-to-market, and deliver compelling experiences across touchpoints. They can bring business intelligence to every lead and every deal, measure impacts, innovate products and processes, and improve conversion, retention, and lifetime customer value.
“By complementing the campaign orchestration capabilities in Adobe Marketing Cloud and Document Cloud with Dynamics 365 sales and customer data, businesses can unify marketing and sales teams and connect every customer interaction,” says Waddell. “And it all works together seamlessly on Azure.”
Adobe Analytics and Power BI
Adobe Analytics Cloud is a data management platform that businesses use to gather data from multiple sources, define audience segments, and target content delivery. Analytics Cloud is now linked with Microsoft Power BI, so analysts can use data feeds from Analytics Cloud, Dynamics 365, and other sources to build interactive dashboards that interoperate easily with other Azure platform services.
The combination of Analytics Cloud and Power BI gives businesses granular data engagement across the entire customer cycle and across the channels, devices, or modes that customers use, whether it’s keyboard, touchscreen, or voice. And they can do it at very large scales; Adobe Analytics currently processes 100 trillion transactions a year across all customers.
“Analysts can use Adobe Analytics with preselected Power BI content packs to get going quickly, or use the Power BI service to explore multiple data sources as deeply as necessary,” says Shroff. “Big data is only getting bigger, and with Power BI and Analytics Cloud, you can scale with it.”
A roadmap to value
Adobe intends to incorporate Microsoft big data capabilities, such as Azure Data Lake, Azure Data Factory, and Cortana Intelligence, into its next-generation data strategy. Both companies have assembled dedicated product management teams and continue to develop an integration roadmap around points of value such as AI services and machine learning.
“We want to focus on ways to help our customers ingest data, clean it, store it at scale, and access it globally in real time,” says Shroff. “With Azure, we can rely on our own core competencies, and not have to build the underlying infrastructure.”
Infrastructure with a view
The partnership between Adobe and Microsoft offers businesses a complete set of content management, campaign orchestration, sales, analytics, and digital document-management services, along with a 360-degree view of every customer’s engagement history. Adobe and Microsoft customers can use these state-of-the-art enterprise services to create, deliver, and manage digital experiences. They can tighten the connections between marketing and sales teams, streamline processes, and drive better results.
Adobe Experience Cloud is fully supported with the Azure global cloud infrastructure and a complete suite of complementary tools for every aspect of the customer cycle, from marketing to sales to customer service.
“By connecting Adobe Experience Cloud with Azure, Dynamics 365, and Power BI, we’ve developed comprehensive content, marketing, sales, and data capabilities that no single vendor can offer,” says Shroff. “In our opinion, other CRM providers can’t offer a truly global, scalable cloud back end, and no other cloud provider can deliver anything like the 360-degree marketing view that we can.”
Scalability, reliability, and competitive opportunities
For Adobe, Microsoft brings several things to Adobe Experience Cloud: scalability, reliability, and the vast Microsoft customer base. Both companies will compete more effectively with providers like Oracle, Salesforce.com, Amazon, and Google, while building mindshare with CIOs and CMOs.
“Microsoft technologies like Azure and Dynamics 365 will help us build the capacity to scale,” says Waddell, “while our deep relationship with Microsoft will present other important growth opportunities for Adobe."
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