Microsoft, Adobe make some progress on their joint cloud commitments
Last September, Adobe officials said they would make a number of their cloud services available as Azure-hosted services. This week, Microsoft and Azure provided an update on their progress.
Last fall, the pair said that Adobe Creative Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Document Cloud would all be available on Azure, and Azure would be the "preferred cloud platform" for these services. (I believe that means optional, not exclusive.)
The pair also announced that Adobe's Marketing Cloud would be Microsoft's Marketing module for the Enterprise version of Dynamics 365, its combined CRM/ERP suite. Microsoft is developing its own, still unofficially announced marketing app for SMBs, which is expected some time this xpring.
At Adobe Summit on March 20, Adobe announced a new umbrella service called Adobe Experience Cloud, which encompasses Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Analytics Cloud, and Adobe Advertising Cloud. The company also announced Adobe Analytics will be integrated with Microsoft Power BI.
The two companies made some incremental progress toward the goals announced last September. Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service -- one component of the Adobe Marketing Cloud -- is available as an Azure-hosted service. Adobe Campaign, another piece of the company's Marketing Cloud, is now integrated with Dynamics 365 Enterprise.
Adobe and Microsoft are collaborating on a semantic data model for customer engagement. They are collaborating with AppDynamics, Acxiom, Dun and Bradstreet, Quaaltrics, Zendesk, [24]7, and MasterCard on this model and will build applications based on the common language. It's not clear from the announcement how this model relates to Microsoft's Common Data Model, which is at the heart of its Dynamics 365 service. (Note: Microsoft officials lately are talking Common Data Service, or CDS, rather than CDM. But, same question as to how this relates still applies.)
Microsoft officials said the pair would provide another update on the progress of their plans at Microsoft's Build 2017 in mid-May.
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