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Adobe to run some of its creative cloud services on Azure

Microsoft and Adobe are extending their existing partnership to enable some of Adobe's subscription services for creative professionals to run on Azure.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Adobe will offer its Adobe Creative Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Document Cloud hosted on Microsoft's Azure.

Microsoft and Adobe officials announced the fruits of their latest partnership agreement on September 26, the first day of Microsoft's Ignite conference for IT pros.

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As with other Microsoft partnerships that also count as Microsoft customer wins -- such as its deal with Facebook for Office 365 and its announcement of an announcement that HPE would be using Dynamics CRM -- the devil is in the details.

Some of Adobe's subscription services for creative professionals currently are hosted on Amazon's AWS. It's not clear from Microsoft's announcement of its new Adobe deal whether Adobe's Creative Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Document Cloud will run on any other cloud backbones, with Azure as a secondary option or choice. I've asked Microsoft, and heard back from a spokesperson that today's deal is not exclusive, but that's all I know at this point.

Work is underway to move these services to the Azure cloud, a spokesperson confirmed, with more information on this coming in the next few months.

Update: An Amazon spokesperson shared the following statement about what the Azure deal doesn/doesn't mean for Adobe and Amazon:

"We have a significant, long-term relationship and agreement with Adobe that hasn't changed. Their customers will want to use AWS, and they're committed to continuing to make that easy."

The press release announcing the Microsoft-Adobe partnership today doesn't mention AWS at all. It says "Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform" for the above-mentioned services. The release mentions that Adobe also will get access to the machine learning, cognitive services like the Cortana Intelligence Suite and SQL Server.

For its part, Microsoft will make the Adobe Marketing Cloud its "preferred marketing service" for the coming Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition, which is expected to be available in 2017. This combined offering is part of Microsoft's play to provide more intelligent sales and marketing services to compete with Salesforce, Oracle, and others in this space who are also touting their artificial intelligence prowess.

Last year, Microsoft and Adobe announced a deal via which Adobe Marketing Cloud services would run on Azure.

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