At Adobe Summit, Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced a step forward in their global partnership (announced in September 2016). The companies are extending their partnership into China to help global brands locally deliver personalized experiences across customer touchpoints in this important and growing market. More than 60 brands around the world already use Adobe and Microsoft’s joint solutions today, including 24 Hour Fitness, AAA Northeast, Avianca, National Center of Missing and Exploited Children and W.B. Mason. Adobe and Microsoft also outlined native technology integrations between Adobe Experience Manager and Microsoft Azure, Adobe Campaign and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Adobe Analytics and Microsoft Power BI.

The expansion of the companies’ partnership into China enables the global availability of Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe Experience Cloud will run on Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet, a leading carrier-neutral cloud provider. Adobe and Microsoft will work jointly with global brands to help them envision and implement their integrated solutions.

Extending Native Integrations

In addition to serving more than 60 global brands today, Adobe and Microsoft’s new native technology integrations include Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service, running on Microsoft Azure to help companies deliver personalized web experiences. The integration of Adobe Campaign and Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables enterprises to compile customer insights, creating a single view of the customer that can be used to personalize experiences across marketing touchpoints. The integration of Adobe Analytics and Microsoft Power BI allows brands to pull data into Power BI to visualize the impact of campaigns across audiences.

Adobe and Microsoft will integrate their respective data models — Adobe XDM “Experience Data Model” and Microsoft CDM “Common Data Model” — into a standard data model that defines and unifies the language for marketing, sales and services data. The standard data model aligns vast data sets across an organization to develop more complete customer profiles and eliminates the need to build and constantly update connectors between systems.