From Adobe Summit 2017: Deep Microsoft partnership is part of a careful transition plan

Microsoft and Adobe surprised their partners, customers, and analysts on Tuesday at Adobe Summit 2017 in Las Vegas. There, the companies announced three integrated solutions that would allow for the combined use of Adobe Campaign with Microsoft Dynamics 365; Adobe Analytics with Power BI; and make the Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service available on Microsoft Azure. They also revealed plans to lead development of a new semantic data model for customer engagement, in conjunction with a consortium of other developers.

While the Microsoft/Adobe alliance was announced last September at Ignite, partners were beginning to get antsy for announcements, and here they are.

"I deal a lot with strategic partnerships, and in this case, seriously strategic partnerships, and I was surprised at how far along this one is in terms of mutual cooperative work, integration and depth of product and platform," Paul Greenberg told MSDynamicsWorld. He is the managing principal of The 56 Group LLC and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, and a customer experience guru.

The strategic fit goes both ways

What makes the partnership especially valuable both ways "is that everything Adobe does, Microsoft doesn't. It's the most complementary thing I've ever seen, [with] hardly any overlap at all," says Greenberg.