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Microsoft and Adobe have announced partnership plans to make Azure the preferred cloud platform for Adobe’s marketing, creative, and document clouds, and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud the preferred option for Dynamics 365 Enterprise.

The partnership, announced in the Microsoft Ignite keynote session today, aims to help enterprise companies ‘embrace digital transformation and deliver compelling, personalised experiences through every phase of their customer relationships’.

“Together, Adobe and Microsoft are bringing the most advanced marketing capabilities on the most powerful and intelligent cloud to help companies digitally transform and engage customers in new ways,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. Shantanu Narayen, Adobe president and CEO, added: “Adobe and Microsoft will bring together the cloud horsepower and end to end capabilities brands need to design and deliver great digital experiences.”

Adobe already has a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in place, with a case study on the AWS website noting that Adobe uses the cloud infrastructure giant to “provide multi-terabyte operating environments for its customers. By integrating its systems with the AWS Cloud, Adobe can focus on deploying and operating its own software instead of infrastructure.”

Whether this continues to be the case remains to be seen, but the Microsoft/Adobe announcement contained little aside from a reference to machine learning technologies in Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite and SQL Server. Given Adobe’s analytics capabilities, this could be an interesting move. A recent study from Adobe Digital Insights found a clearly positive correlation between website traffic growth and forms of personalised marketing, such as social advertising.

The press materials concluded with: “The companies’ mutual customers will be able to harness their data for critical insights and predictions, connect customer touchpoints across their business, bolster relationships, and drive brand loyalty and growth.”