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Microsoft's new partnership with Adobe touches on cloud computing and CRM data.

LAS VEGAS Adobe's technology partnership with Microsoft will help businesses connect with customers in richer ways because it combines cloud infrastructure, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and data analytics technology.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group for Microsoft, shared those insights this morning on the main stage here at the Venetian Hotel as Adobe kicked off its digital marketing conference. Adobe is hosting 12,000 attendees this week for its annual week-long Adobe Summit.

Adobe used the Day 1 keynote today to showcase its partnership with Microsoft, first announced six months ago its Microsoft Ignite. The partnership features integrations between the newly announced Adobe Experience Cloud and Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Power BI.

From Microsoft's perspective, the partnership is another way to boost its data and cloud-hosting play and help get ahead of Salesforce, Oracle and Amazon.

For Adobe, which has 15,700 employees and $5.9 billion in revenue last year, it's a chance to improve its reported weakness in cloud hosting offerings.

The announcement that Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service is now available on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform drew perhaps the loudest applause from the audience during the morning keynote.

Forrester in its Wave report on web content management technologies gave Adobe low marks for its cloud strategy, calling it a weakness because the "only option is a managed hosted flavor of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)."

But Adobe pushed today its vision for an API-based technology ecosystem, a better exchange framework with third-party integrations and a flexible cloud hosting architecture on Azure.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen promised the morning crowd his company will "step up" because "we know your transformation requires more than digital marketing technology."

"Every organization is out there looking to enable deep digital transformation and engage its customers fundamentally in new ways," Guthrie said. "Data is in many systems across the enterprises in silos. It's difficult to combine it and gain insight."

Specifically, the Adobe-Microsoft partnership:

Abhay Parasnis, executive vice president and chief technology for Adobe, said businesses spend far too much time "solving for broken internet systems."

Microsoft's Guthrie, who shared the stage with Parasnis in the three-hour keynote, agreed these are problems Microsoft hears "over and over." Its partnership with Adobe will help common customers solve common system problems.

The integrations, he said, helps organizations combine business data and take the outcomes into a CRM pipeline for "rich data visualization."

Guthrie added customers can host data in one of Microsoft Azure's 38 regional data centers and deploy code that will keep data inside those centers.

The new partners also announced a collaboration on a semantic data model that will standardize how data is structured and improve the time it takes to gain insights.

AppDynamics, Acxiom, Dun & Bradstreet, Qualtrics, Zendesk, [24]7 and MasterCard are helping Adobe and Microsoft develop the new data model and build apps for a common language. Officials promised an update at Microsoft Build 2017 on May 10-12.

Adobe executives also used the morning keynote to show their focus on becoming an "experience business" versus just digital marketing.

It did away with its "Adobe Marketing Cloud" overarching branding approach and now goes with "Adobe Experience Cloud." Marketing Cloud is now just one pillar of the Experience Cloud along with Analytics Cloud, Advertising Cloud, Creative Cloud for Enterprise and Document Cloud for Enterprise.

Adobe CEO Narayen called the experience business a "massively bigger opportunity for all of us" over digital marketing alone.

The experience business makes technology transparent and allows consumers to set their terms for interactions, said Brad Rencher, executive vice president and general manager for Adobe's digital marketing business unit.

Rencher, speaking to this morning's keynote audience, said delivering experiences is no longer a marketing charter. All departments are "stewards of experience," he said.

He plugged the Experience Cloud, telling the audience they "need Adobe Experience Cloud" because of its products, services, extensibility and robust partner ecosystem.

Original post:
Microsoft, Adobe Partner to Boost Analytics, Cloud Hosting - CMSWire

SUMMARY:

OakNorth Bank, the first in the UK to run 100% in the cloud, recounts why it made the move and lessons learned from the experience

In May last year, with the ink still drying on the regulators guidance for cloud-hosted banking, OakNorth Bank became the first bank in the UK to bring its core systems live in the cloud.

The challenger bank had always wanted to run in the cloud, but at the time of its launch in March 2015 the regulator wasnt ready to allow cloud hosting. So OakNorth started out with a system that ran as a SaaS solution, hosted in a private data center. Once the regulator gave the go-ahead, the bank migrated its systems to a virtual private cloud hosted on Amazon Web Services.

The decision to run in the cloud was made for business reasons, says the banks Chief Operating Officer Francesca Gandolfo:

We look at technology for the value it brings to the business, not for the gimmicks. We went to cloud because we believe it fundamentally helps our business model.

The bank reached break-even in August 2016 and tripled its loan book in the second half of 2016, profiting from a slowdown in lending by established banks in the wake of the unexpected Brexit vote in June 2016. Its smaller size allowed it to reassess the risk environment quickly and continue lending while others retrenched, says Gandolfo.

OakNorth specializes in lending to entrepreneurs for business ventures and property schemes. It has taken 250 million ($310m) in retail deposits from 7,000 savers and its loan book is in excess of 300 million ($372m), says Gandolfo.

She reels off a list of reasons for adopting the cloud, from flexibility, scale and creativity to security, cost, and being able to focus on the core business of banking.

Being an infrastructure host is not our core business. Why did we break even? Because of laser-like focus on things that drive the business.

Cost stands out as a key element, although not merely in terms of saving money. We have a cost which is fit for purpose, she says. The bank is free to upgrade or downgrade to suit the business, she explains, able to spend more when needed, while saving money on other elements that dont have to be state-of-the-art.

For example, when introducing new capabilities, its better to over-provide resources so that theres enough headroom for unexpected demands, she explains:

Dont try to optimize from day one. If you stay too much skin-to-the-bone, things will fall over and fail. Do the right trade-offs.

Looking back, replatforming to AWS was a valuable learning experience, she says:

There are a few things we would have done different, but I would not go back and redo it because we learned a whole lot.

There is a huge amount of value in experimentation. Give people the freedom to try things and fail. There is some value in failure but controlled failure, not reckless failure!

And she doesnt rule out the possibility of replatforming again should the need arise:

We rebuilt the bank twice within a year. I think we have this down to an art. We want to make sure we are robust and have our destiny in our hands.

An interesting insight into the factors that come into play when migrating traditionally on-premise functions to the cloud.

Image credit - Sourced from OakNorth Bank

Disclosure - Francesca Gandolfo was speaking at Cloud Expo Europe

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Lessons learned at the UK's first 100% cloud bank - Diginomica