Microsoft and BlackRock announce strategic partnership to host Aladdin Investment Platform on Azure Cloud

Today, Microsoft and BlackRock announced a new strategic partnership to host BlackRock’s Aladdin infrastructure on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.  BlackRock is a leading global investment management company with more than $7.4 trillion and with this new partnership, BlackRock and Microsoft will work together to bring its Aladdin platform to the cloud with the goal of creating new opportunities for scale and innovation for BlackRock’s customers.

Aladdin is BlackRock’s end-to-end investment management and operations platform that combines a range of services for its customers including portfolio and risk management, trading, and operations.  By leveraging the cloud, BlackRock’s Aladdin customers are now able to better meet their infrastructure requirements around resiliency and security, while also being to scale and support the localized needs of its clients by leveraging Microsoft Azure’s network of global data centers.

“By bringing Aladdin to the cloud, Microsoft will support BlackRock in further enhancing its client experience while also enabling continuous innovation in the financial services industry,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business. “Together, we will empower an ecosystem of financial services customers running their most critical workloads in the cloud.”

With this partnership, BlackRock and Microsoft indicated that they also work together on initiatives that leverage technology to improve and expand sustainability data and analytics including close partnerships with academics, startups, non-profits, and others to improve the lack of standardized, high-quality data.  The first initiative will be to collaborate on challenge grants for organizations that use data and technology to understand and drive sustainability.