When two companies announce that they’re working together in a strategic partnership, the question on many lips is, “Is it real or is it marketing hype?” Our partnership with Microsoft is very real. In the six months since the initial announcement was made in September, we’ve brought to market the first set of joint offerings; and, at Microsoft’s Build event earlier this month, Adobe’s CTO, Abhay Parasnis, joined Microsoft’s EVP of Cloud and Enterprise, Scott Guthrie, onstage in the keynote to share the details of the partnership with Microsoft’s developer community.

What’s in It for Developers?
The partnership presents huge potential for the developer community. Building on both companies’ strong track records in enterprise applications, data science, and machine learning, Adobe and Microsoft are collaborating on a semantic data model that promises to transform enterprise integration — aimed at understanding and driving real-time customer engagement. This model will standardize how data is structured and vastly expedite the process of gaining insights from massive amounts of data, providing developers with opportunities to innovate and deliver new, reimagined solutions for their customers.

This is how enterprises will enrich customer experiences.

With Adobe Experience Cloud, Creative Cloud, and Document Cloud, we’re using massive volumes of content and data in incredibly rich ways. A big part of the attraction of this partnership with Microsoft was Azure and the rich services it enables — such as Data Lake and Data Factory, both of which make it easier and faster to develop solutions that store data of any size or shape and to compose and manage data services at scale. We are incredibly excited about what it will enable us to do internally with our Adobe portfolio.

This is how digital transformation will be accelerated.

Win-Win
While we’re still in the early stages of our partnership — and so much possibility remains with regard to what could be done (as was shown in the Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Teams’ and Adobe Sign and Microsoft Teams’ ‘technology concept’ demos at Build) — we can already point to tangible deliverables in our joint offerings today and those still on the developmental roadmap. We share a lot of joint customers, so it’s in both our interests to provide incremental, differentiated value to these customers.

So, when people ask, “Is this partnership just marketing hype,” we answer, “Heck, no!” This is a partnership with a foundation in deep, joint engineering; combining the best in sales/customer relationship management (Microsoft Dynamics) and experience-marketing technology (Adobe Experience Cloud) on one best-in-class platform (Microsoft Azure) that has global scale, security, and trust at the core.

Just think of the possibilities.