Almost one year after Microsoft and Adobe announced the start of a sweeping partnership, the two companies are teaming up again, this time to promote each other’s e-signature and cloud technologies.
Microsoft plans to make Adobe Sign the “preferred” e-signature technology within Office 365 and other Microsoft services. In exchange, Adobe will promote Microsoft Teams to its Creative Cloud users as its “preferred collaboration service,” and it will make Azure its “preferred” cloud service for Adobe Sign, both companies announced Thursday.
As you can probably tell at this point, and as noted by ZDnet’s Mary Jo Foley, these types of partnership announcements don’t mean that all users of one company’s product are going to suddenly start using the other company’s product. While the two companies certainly hope to see increased usage of their products by marketing them to another company’s large installed base, there are still a lot of Office 365 users that will go on using DocuSign for legal agreements and Creative Cloud customers who will collaborate with their colleagues through Slack. DocuSign actually announced at Microsoft’s Build conference that it would be expanding its business using Azure, and it also designated Azure as its preferred cloud service.
Still, the two software companies have been expanding their strategic partnership since it was announced last year, so it appears they’re still happy with it. Last year at Microsoft Ignite the two companies announced the first set of “preferred” partner relationships, designating Azure as the desired public cloud service for Adobe’s three cloud-based marketing software packages and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud product as Microsoft’s favorite marketing service for Dynamics 365 customers. And at Build in May, Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis joined Microsoft Azure chief Scott Guthrie on stage to talk about the budding partnership between the two companies.
