Microsoft and ON24 Team Up for Seamless Webinars
At ON24, we’re all about making personal engagement at scale as easy as possible. Which is why we’re pretty excited to be selected as the only webinar platform supported by the flourishing Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 platform. And it’s a booming platform, seeing a 65 percent growth rate during the first three quarters of fiscal 2018 — even faster than Microsoft Office 365.
Dynamics 365 is a combination of applications, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and marketing automation, hosted on Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud platform. Dynamics 365 for Marketing is an ideal solution for marketers and marketing agencies seeking to simplify their business applications on the Microsoft stack.
To get a better idea of just what this partnership between Microsoft and ON24 entails — and what everyone gets out of it — we sat down with Lou Pelosi, VP of Business Development and Partnerships at ON24 to ask him a few questions about this development. Here’s what he had to say:
Q:
Can you explain the relationship between Microsoft and ON24?
Lou Pelosi:
From a high level, we’ve expanded our customer and technical relationship with Microsoft and signed a co-marketing agreement with their Microsoft Dynamics 365 team. The goals of the agreement are to drive greater value for our joint customers and to market and sell together to obtain new customers.
Q:
What was the impetus for this partnership?
Lou Pelosi:
Microsoft launched Dynamics 365 for Marketing earlier this spring to connect sales and marketing and help them to make smarter decisions to maximize marketing ROI. Our strategies and promises — especially when it comes to facilitating both human engagement and actionable insights at scale — to marketers are aligned and complementary.
Microsoft, and Dynamics 365, in particular, has been on a tear recently. Market share is up, the stock price has tripled in recent years, and investing in new SaaS architectures and applications which have significant momentum in the market.
Q:
How will ON24 work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing?
Lou Pelosi:
The Microsoft marketing application includes an out-of-the-box ON24 adapter allowing marketers to schedule and reserve ON24 webinars without leaving the marketing application. It also provides both the ON24 presenter and audience URLs to use in emails and landing pages for event promotion and execution. Ultimately, the marketer understands who registered, who attended and collects actionable data on engaged attendees.
Microsoft customers must still purchase an ON24 account, but the initial integration simplifies the webinar process.
Q:
How will this evolve over time?
Lou Pelosi:
Microsoft and ON24 continue to invest heavily in marketing technologies and solutions. There are several ways our relationship could evolve as we move forward. Options include improving the out-of-the-box integration capabilities to add more fields and more data for the marketer to gain more insights, improving workflows to simplify webinar management and execution and collaborating on our broader portfolio of martech solutions. We’ll be working diligently in the coming months to communicate our value to customers, prospects and partners. If there are any questions about how you can benefit from the partnership, you can email dynamics@on24.com.
