Microsoft and Adobe share sales and marketing data in push against Salesforce and Oracle

Microsoft and Adobe have teamed up to share their respective sales and marketing software products that would help them to compete more strongly against rivals such as Salesforce and Oracle.

At its annual user conference in California, Adobe announced it will work with Microsoft to create a shared data format between its marketing software suite dubbed Experience Cloud and Microsoft's sales software called Dynamics, Reuters reported.

"Today's customers have high standards when it comes to brand interactions. Enterprise companies must deliver exceptional experiences at scale or risk losing customers to competitors," said Abhay Parasnis, executive vice president and CTO at Adobe.

"Bringing together Adobe's and Microsoft's sales, marketing and customer intelligence solutions enables brands to better understand and engage with their customers across all touch points," said Parasnis.

The partnership between the two companies is based on a deal they announced last September. The deal allowed Adobe to deliver its Cloud services on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft to make Adobe as its marketing service for Dynamics 365 enterprise.

Adobe has been trying to bolster its business-to-business marketing software since it acquired Omniture software for about $1.8bn (£1.46bn) in October 2009.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying to expand its Dynamics software system for sales people and working with Adobe would help it compete strongly against Salesforce and Oracle.

"We believe the combined power of our technologies will allow enterprise businesses to harness their data in new ways, unlocking critical business insights and actionable intelligence," said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft.

Melissa Webster, an analysts with IDC, told Reuters that data sharing between systems to ensure customers get a smooth experience will be "an important battleground" in business-to-business software.

"Every time a company says with its body language who are you, again?' it eats into their brand quality a little bit," said Webster.