At the recent Adobe Symposium in Chicago, I had the chance to attend a presentation by Dr. Cedric D Alford. Dr. Alford is leading the go to market strategy for the Adobe-Microsoft partnership.

To this point, I have to admit, I’ve struggled to see how these two industry giants benefit from a partnership, even though they do have somewhat complementary portfolios.

Why Adobe + Microsoft?

Luckily, Dr. Alford managed to distill it down to a simple value proposition: Adobe and Microsoft are bringing together Marketing and Sales.

Adobe is the leader in marketing platforms via the Adobe Creative and Marketing Clouds. Microsoft’s Dynamics and PowerBI are industry leading tools for sales organizations. By bringing these two platforms together, Adobe and Microsoft are stronger than either are on their own.

Step 1: Clouds Converge

Now that we get the intent, how do we make that happen? Well, first, Adobe and Microsoft are literally bringing their clouds together. By running Adobe’s Marketing Cloud on Microsoft Azure, Adobe and Microsoft’s products can be more tightly integrated without the friction of external integrations.

Perficient is excited to support this collaboration! Download our paper to understand how Perficient’s expertise in both the Adobe Marketing Cloud and Microsoft Azure can help your organization adopt this cloud solution.

But Wait, There’s More!

Along with the cloud convergence, Adobe and Microsoft are bringing more to the table to bring together Marketing and Sales. The integration of Adobe Campaign + Dynamics and Adobe Analytics + Power BI both align to the vision of bringing Marketing and Sales together.

Insights 2.0: Digital Analytics Convergence

The convergence of Digital Analytics and Business Intelligence will be one of the biggest trends shaping analytics over the next couple years. Customer Intelligence, or the convergence of Digital Analytics and Business Intelligence will remove the artificial barrier which exists in many organizations between how marketing and sales views customers.

In the last #AdobeChat we discussed the future of Analytics and this convergence was a common thread.

Daniel! what up buddy. Convergence I think that is the one word answer on the future of analytics. #adobechat

— Ross Quintana (@Ross_Quintana) July 19, 2017

The integration of Adobe Analytics and PowerBI is a key part of the Adobe and Microsoft story. It enables any organization to build Customer Intelligence. In the next blog post, I’ll be discussing how Perficient has been exploring this powerful integration!