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Adobe pairs with Microsoft to pool sales and marketing expertise

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By John Glenday | Reporter

March 21, 2017 | 3 min read

Microsoft has joined forces with software provider Adobe in order to pool their respective sales and marketing expertise in a bid to outflank rivals Salesforce and Oracle when it comes to offering their big data services to marketers.

The tie-up will see both partners create a shared data format allowing integration of Adobe’s marketing software, henceforth to be known as the Experience Cloud, with Microsoft’s own Dynamics sales software to create a seamless system spanning the two.

The partners spoke today (March 21) at the annual Adobe Summit, where they emphasised the importance of using open source technology and software to de-silo the information they have at their disposal.

They went on to explain how this joint approach will help marketers more easily compile customer insights across various channels, creating a single view of the customer that can be used to personalize experiences across marketing touchpoints.

Extolling the match-up Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division said: “It’s going to enable to customers to go beyond the current (software) silos they have to navigate today.”

Data sharing between both parties promises to provide businesses with better services by enabling crossover of users from one business to the other, expanding their pools of prospective customers.

The pair are furthering the open data approach, and also used today's product showcase to demonstrate how they collaborating with a number of third parties to standardise how data is structured.

This project to construct an open "semantic data model for understanding" will involve a host of third parties including: AppDynamics; Acxiom; Dun & Bradstreet; Qualtrics; Zendesk, [24]7 and MasterCard.

The end results will help participating parties to gain customer insights from mass amounts of data in real-time (currently this is technically a very comlex and difficult task), with adoption of such services meaning brands can "vastly expedite the process of gaining insights from massive amounts of data."

Adobe and Microsoft first established a relationship late last year when Adobe agreed to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services, with business to business marketing software, particularly software which companies use to run digital marketing and advertising campaigns which accounted for some $1.2bn of Adobe’s $4.6bn revenues last year.

Both Microsoft and Adobe are expected to provide an update on the progress at Microsoft Build 2017 on May 10-12. Adobe recently began experimenting with VR ads to provide a more immersive environment for brands.

Additional reporting by Ronan ShieldsRead more about the launch of The Adobe Experience Cloud here

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