thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Microsoft and Adobe announce a WOW partnership

Microsoft and Adobe announce a WOW partnership

Today Microsoft and Adobe announced a deep strategic partnership. Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for their Marketing, Creative, and Document Clouds; Microsoft in turn will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition. Wow! That is a game changer in the CRM world. It takes the other tier one players, especially Salesforce, and Oracle, following their AI announcements, plus SugarCRM, head on. While I expect some AI driven marketing functionality being announced near term the initial benefit is a leading marketing tool being accessible for Microsoft. This partnership is also a blow to Oracles IaaS story as it drives load to Azure where Oracle seems to focus on their existing customer base. Well, and then there is AWS, too … And it should be highly beneficial for both companies. Not talking about the benefits of running on a powerful cloud platform Adobe with Cortana gets access to and likely will be integrated into a leading AI and machine learning platform. Conversely, the so far not too strong marketing functionality in Dynamics CRM gets a significant boost by getting integrated with one of the hottest marketing clouds that are around at the moment. The synergies that can be generated by tightly integrating a powerful real time analytics and AI platform, powerful productivity applications, and a strong marketing platform can hardly be overestimated. This is very good news for Microsoft Dynamics customers once the systems actually are running on a harmonized data model. Till then the prospects are highly exciting. As a result, as per the announcement, customers will be able...
Is a Twitter acquisition pending? A Snap Analysis

Is a Twitter acquisition pending? A Snap Analysis

Back in June most of us got surprised by the news that Microsoft has acquired LinkedIn. Neither of us deemed this a bad move from a company point of view. There ae just too many potential synergies between MS Dynamics CRM, Office365, Azure on one side and LinkedIn, as the leading business network on the other. At that time many of us, including myself, were musing about when Twitter will be acquired, and by who. #MSFT acquired #LinkedIn – Twitter now the last source of global personal #data. Is it up for grabs? Who would buy? #AAPL? #Google? — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 thinking of it – @SAP might find Twitter a good match, looking at their recent offerings #bigdata #AI #analytics https://t.co/sgUpcLgRBK — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 My initial guesses have been Apple or Google, then suggesting SAP to have a look into it. Thinking of it I could have added Oracle, IBM and Salesforce or media companies including telcos into the mix. In brief, a lot of companies should be interested in the treasure pit of data, behavioral data, that Twitter holds. Why? There are multiple reasons. Twitter is the last remaining independent social media outside Facebook and the big Chinese ones that the big western companies will not get access to; Tencent, Alibaba, Momo, etc. are rather buying it themselves than being for sale (to a western company), Facebook doesn’t need to. Twitter has a profitability and growth challenge, but an interesting technology and, importantly, is a great source of real time information about a lot of topics, from business to consumer....