Growing the Microsoft and Adobe cloud partnership
Last week, I had the opportunity to spend two days at the Adobe Summit, where our longstanding partnership with Adobe grew deeper and stronger. The momentum around Adobe and Microsoft was palpable, and I’m thrilled that we’re offering our mutual customers best-in-class solutions to provide great experiences for their customers. It was an exciting week in Las Vegas!
The next steps for the Open Data Initiative
During Wednesday’s general session, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen onstage for a conversation covering digital transformation, creating a learn-it-all culture at Microsoft, and leveraging data to create personalized, impactful customer experiences. We also saw the Open Data Initiative (ODI) in action. As originally announced last September by Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP, the ODI is a new approach to business data that helps companies transform customer experiences through real-time insights delivered from the cloud.
Unilever, one of the early global brands to express support and excitement about the ODI, announced its intention to leverage these data connections immediately. At the Adobe Summit, Unilever demonstrated how it plans to bring together disparate customer, product, and resource data and use AI-driven insights to reduce plastic packaging and encourage consumer recycling. By eliminating silos of data, Unilever will connect inventory and plastics data with Adobe data on Azure to enhance customer experiences and encourage participation in this sustainability initiative.
We also announced a new approach as part of the ODI for publishing, enriching, and ingesting initial data feeds from the Adobe Experience Platform, activated through Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA, into a customer’s Azure Data Lake. This enables customers to use AI and machine learning to generate new, actionable insights that can transform their business.
Just after Wednesday’s general session, I had the privilege of kicking off the first-ever meeting of our ODI Partner Advisory Council, along with my colleagues from Adobe and SAP. Our partners will be critical to unlocking the true opportunity presented by the ODI, and I’m excited to work closely with them to develop this initiative further and bring this innovation capability to more customers.
Read more about ODI in last week’s announcement.
Accelerating account-based experiences with LinkedIn
On Tuesday, we also announced a new extension of the Microsoft and Adobe partnership to include LinkedIn. This addition expands opportunities for product innovation and increases value for our joint customers. We’re adding new integrations across Adobe Experience Cloud, Dynamics 365 for Sales, and LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to accelerate account-based experiences – empowering B2B marketers and account-based sellers to easily identify, understand and engage customers, and create better orchestration, measurement, and delivery of targeted content for more personalized experiences.
Enterprise sales and large account deals often demand long negotiations, multiple decision makers, and complex relationship dynamics. We believe account-based experience drives success. Today, enabled by deeper data integration across Microsoft, Adobe, and LinkedIn, marketing and sales teams can tailor their offerings to individual customers, understand changing demands, and land complex sales.
Read more about this in the announcement from Adobe.
Customers seeing value of Adobe + Microsoft
Also on Tuesday, Brenda Bown, General Manager for Microsoft Business Applications, hosted a panel with Matthew Jafarian, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Innovation, Miami Heat and Mark Pelletier, Vice President of eBusiness, AAA Northeast. Matthew and Mark represent two of many customers using Adobe and Microsoft solutions to understand and delight customers. They shared their challenges and opportunities, explaining how their partnership with Adobe and Microsoft connects them with people in a more personal, relevant way.
For Matthew, working with the Miami Heat, this was all about the guests in the stadium:
“We’re focused on fan facing technology. That’s everything from ticketing tech when you walk in the building, that’s retail tech, that’s food and beverage tech. All of that data flows into our applications, Dynamics 365, our martech stack which is primarily Adobe—everything is focused on creating great fan experiences.”
This type of business evolution is underway across the globe.
In Colombia, Avianca Airlines is focused on creating highly personalized and specific customer journeys for every passenger they fly. As Santiago Aldana Sanin, CDO and CTO, explains, success in the travel business requires a focus on the complete experience, from booking, to the gate, to the air. They are already seeing the value of customer-centric IT with Microsoft and Adobe today.
Closer to home, 24 Hour Fitness has pioneered the health and wellness industry for more than 30 years. Today, with the partnership between Adobe and Dynamics 365, 24 Hour Fitness targets and nurtures users throughout their health journey, from exercise evaluation and purchase, to long-term wellness and personal engagement, all on a single digital platform.
Our commercial environment is changing. And my favorite part of this job is not the growing list of marketplace applications, services, and solutions, it’s the partnerships. By partnering with industry leaders like Adobe, growing our ecosystem with ISVs, and working directly with customers to build new solutions, we can add genuine value and help transform the world together.
Last week’s Adobe Summit was the next step in our ongoing partnership with Adobe. Learn more about the Open Data Initiative and how this partnership can transform your business here.
