Salesforce.com Inc. will move its Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure platform as part of a new hosting deal the companies revealed today.

It’s safe to assume the contract is quite large even though the tech giants didn’t disclose any financial details. Marketing Cloud is a suite of advertising tools, analytics features and related products that ranks as one of the  most widely-used toolkits in the category. Salesforce doesn’t break out the unit’s exact sales figures but said in August that Marketing Cloud and the Commerce Cloud e-commerce toolkit generated combined revenues of $616 million last quarter.

Salesforce’s decision to choose Azure is notable for other reasons as well. One of them is that Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 suite directly competes with Marketing Cloud in some areas. Another factor is that Salesforce runs many of its other services on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, which means it could have just as easily chosen one of those platforms over Azure.

Deploying on AWS or Google Cloud may have even been simpler from a technical standpoint since the company’s information technology group is already familiar with them. However, going with Azure reduces the risk of Salesforce becoming overly dependent on any one provider. This kind of multicloud strategy is quickly emerging as a best practice among large enterprises, even in cases when they don’t directly compete with their cloud providers.

Salesforce’s relationship with Microsoft has been one of “coopetition” for several years now. Outside the infrastructure-as-a-service arena, the companies compete for customers in areas such as marketing while also providing integrations among key products.

Their newly announced cloud deal will deepen the latter aspect of the partnership. Salesforce will integrate its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud platform for customer support groups with Teams, Microsoft’s workplace chat tool, to let users view business records directly in the messaging interface. The companies said the feature will become available in late 2020.

More integrations may arrive in the future. The companies could, for instance, add more connectors to help joint customers import data from Marketing Cloud into Azure’s numerous analytics services. Microsoft already provides such a connector for its Azure Data Factory offering.

The Salesforce hosting deal is the latest in a string of high-profile cloud contracts the company has won recently. Earlier this year, it beat AWS to the U.S. Defense Department’s $10 billion JEDI contract and inked a $2 billion agreement with AT&T Inc. to provide cloud services to its core telecommunications business. 

Photo of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (left) and Salesforce co-CEO Mark Benioff: Microsoft