Salesforce says it will use Microsoft's Azure for its Marketing Cloud service, signaling a thaw in a complicated relationship
Jordan Novet / CNBC :
Context & Ripple Effects
Salesforce has a pattern of renting infrastructure from its biggest rivals: it put its IoT cloud on AWS in 2016 (IoT cloud running on Amazon) alongside a disclosed $400M four-year AWS spend, then deepened that relationship with new integration capabilities in 2021. The Marketing Cloud move extends the same playbook to Microsoft, whose Dynamics franchise competes directly with Salesforce's core CRM business.
Marketing Cloud itself was assembled partly through the $700M Krux acquisition, bought to close an ad tech gap with rival marketing clouds — so this workload carries competitive weight. Running it on Azure turns Microsoft from pure competitor into critical supplier, which is why CNBC frames the move as a thaw.
First-order effects
- Microsoft gains a marquee enterprise SaaS workload on Azure from the company whose CRM directly challenges Dynamics — revenue plus a proof point against AWS and Google in enterprise deals.
- Salesforce diversifies Marketing Cloud off AWS, reducing single-supplier dependence for one of its flagship services while keeping the option open across all three hyperscalers.
Second-order effects
- AWS loses its status as Salesforce's default infrastructure home, giving Amazon a reason to deepen the relationship commercially — which the later integration partnership and the 2023 AWS marketplace listing suggest it did.
- Rival marketing cloud operators face a competitor whose data platform now sits on Azure, complicating Microsoft's ability to favor Dynamics-side marketing tools without risking the Salesforce revenue.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, SaaS vendors routinely multi-home across hyperscalers that are also their product competitors — cloud competition shifts from locking in applications to winning rival apps' infrastructure spend.
- Supplier-customer entanglement of this kind pressures cloud providers toward neutral positioning guarantees, a structural tension regulators scrutinize as hyperscalers accumulate both platform and application power.
The trend: Enterprise software's fiercest rivals are becoming each other's infrastructure customers, as SaaS vendors spread workloads across every major cloud rather than betting on one.