LAS VEGAS – Six months after announcing their partnership at Microsoft Corp.’s Ignite conference in September, the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant and Adobe Systems Inc. announced their first three joint offerings at the latter’s Adobe Summit marketing conference on Tuesday.
Released on March 22, the new solutions allow customers to integrate Adobe Campaign and Microsoft Dynamics 365; the newly-released Adobe Analytics with Microsoft Power BI (Business Intelligence); or access Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service through Microsoft Azure.
The ultimate aim, Adobe executive vice president and CTO Abhay Parasnis and Microsoft executive vice president Scott Guthrie said, is to help customers better align their sales and marketing efforts by giving them access to the best features of both platforms so they can build portable, personalized, consistent – and, ultimately, profitable – experiences for their customers.
“It’s just been a fantastic partnership,” Guthrie said during a March 22 presentation. “Every organization out there is looking to enable deep digital transformation, to engage with their customers in fundamental new ways… and the partnership we have is… really looking at ways that we can deeply integrate our offerings together to enable that new fundamental customer engagement.”
The three solutions revealed by Adobe and Microsoft during the former’s Summit conference are:
- The integration of Adobe Campaign and Microsoft Dynamics 365, which enables businesses to compile customer insights across multiple channels, creating a single portrait of the customer that can be used to personalize their experiences from one platform to another.
- Adobe Analytics and Microsoft Power BI, which together provide executives with greater insight across their company, thanks to support for behavioural data that allows them to visualize campaign impacts across multiple segments, and identify the most effective customer touchpoints along the way.
- By adding Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service to Microsoft Azure, companies can deliver personalized web experiences faster and more efficiently than before no matter where their customers are.
Adobe and Microsoft also announced they were collaborating on a semantic data model for analyzing real-time customer engagement, by standardizing how data is structured and therefore making it easier to draw insights from whatever is submitted.
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That said, the opportunities presented by the solutions go well beyond simply mixing three sets of complementary platforms, Guthrie noted: For example, businesses can use them to predictively identify at-risk customers, develop a campaign to re-engage them by feeding the data into a CRM system, then track the results using data visualization-based AI, anywhere in the world.
Providing end-to-end integration at the platform level also allows businesses to customize their apps more easily, capture behavioral data, and glean insights from both Adobe’s and Microsoft’s extensive web of services.
“Going forward we want to fundamentally integrate cloud infrastructure, SaaS solutions, and a common data platform to really enable all of you to engage with your customers in ever-richer ways,” he told the audience.
Both companies are expected to provide an update on their progress at Microsoft’s Build 2017 conference, which is scheduled to be held in Seattle, Wash. between May 10 and 12.
