Adobe and Microsoft are combining their strengths against common rival Salesforce to vie for dominance in the sales and marketing software market.
Microsoft is of course best known for its Windows operating system and Office software, but the company is eager to grow its Dynamics 365 sales software business, used by sales professionals to track deals. Dynamics 365 launched in 2016, and was a key factor in Microsoft’s decision to acquire professional networking platform LinkedIn for $26 billion that same year.
Similarly Adobe, known primarily for content creation tools such as Photoshop, wants to grow its share of the software market with Adobe Experience Cloud, a collection of cloud-based marketing, advertising and analytics tools. It incorporates the Marketo Engagement Platform, which uses data analytics and artificial intelligence to target advertising and manage marketing campaigns in the B2B space. While most of Adobe’s tools were designed for marketing to consumers, its $4.7 billion acquisition of Marketo last year bolstered its capabilities in B2B marketing.
The partnership between Microsoft and Adobe is meant to fill gaps in each of the companies’ sales and marketing software capabilities. Specifically Adobe and Microsoft want to make it easier for users of Adobe’s marketing software to target entire teams of B2B customers on LinkedIn. For example, when an Adobe user makes a business deal, they would be able to target LinkedIn ads to everyone who was involved in the purchasing decision. If the marketing campaign is successful, the customer would then employ Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 to close the deal, Reuters explains.
“The LinkedIn network is one of those clear holy grails” for business marketers, said Steve Lucas, Senior Vice President of Digital Experience at Adobe and former CEO of Marketo. “It has just become such a huge lever for B-to-B marketers that it would be impossible for us to ignore it.”
By integrating their systems, Adobe and Microsoft expect to offer something “a lot broader” because most marketing content is made with Adobe software, said Melissa Webster, Program Vice President for Content and Digital Media Technologies at research firm IDC. “There’s no question that Microsoft and Adobe both have a lot to gain from teaming up against Salesforce,” she added.
