Just a few years after #3 Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris wrote an extensive blog post announcing #2 AWS as Salesforce’s “preferred public-cloud infrastructure provider,” Marc Benioff’s company has totally rewritten that script by shifting its Marketing Cloud from AWS to #Microsoft’s Azure IaaS. At the same time, the budding Salesforce-Microsoft cloudmance is spilling over into its two other mega-clouds: Sales and Service. Both will now become deeply integrated with Microsoft’s hyper-growth Teams collaboration suite. So what’s going on here? Has AWS been jilted? Or, since a few years in the Cloud Wars is like a decade back on Planet Earth, is the embrace of Microsoft Azure by Salesforce simply a pragmatic move by Benioff to make life easier for customers in the midst of making deep commitments to the Microsoft cloud?

Surely there’s some of both going on. But at the same time, I’ve gotta believe that, in a larger sense, this is another clear indication of Microsoft’s ascendancy in the cloud. Just look at the string of deep and high-impact alliances Microsoft has formed in recent months with other vendors in the Cloud Wars Top 10: with #4 SAP to help global corporations move huge SAP workloads to the Azure public cloud, which is now the dominant IaaS environment for such moves; #5 Oracle in a “cloud-interconnect” deal that Larry Ellison says will only get closer; and with #9 ServiceNow for public-sector and highly regulated industries. Overall, these customer-centric partnerships are a sure indication that the world’s leading cloud vendors are maturing rapidly in the right ways!