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Microsoft Inks Extensive Cloud Partnership with Adobe

Adobe's Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings will run primarily in Microsoft's Azure public cloud, the two companies announced Monday.

The announcement came during the kickoff presentation of Microsoft's annual Ignite conference for IT pros and developers, taking place this week in Atlanta, Ga.

Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen joined Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella onstage during the opening keynote to signal an extension of a partnership that began two years ago, when the two companies worked together to optimize Adobe's apps for Windows 10 and Microsoft's Surface PC tablet.

As part of Monday's announcement, the Adobe Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Marketing Cloud products will all run on Azure. Marketing Cloud will also be optimized for the forthcoming Dynamics 365 suite, which Microsoft unveiled earlier this summer.

"We think there is an opportunity out of the box to provide integration for all of our joint customers to have one integrated sales and marketing service," Narayen said.

For Microsoft, Adobe's decision to run its massive SaaS infrastructure on Azure is the latest major endorsement of its public cloud. Other key customers using Azure include General Electric, Renault-Nissan, Tyco and Boeing.

"This coming together of the intelligent cloud with transformative SaaS applications with creativity and marketing is a massive milestone," Nadella said.

The two companies indicated that they are developing more integrated offerings tying Office 365 and Dynamics 365 to Adobe's products, although Monday's announcement did not elaborate on that point.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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