Microsoft Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Salesforce.com

Competition between Microsoft and Salesforce.com heated up Tuesday as Microsoft, maker of Dynamics CRM, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the Software-as-a-Service CRM provider in U.S. District Court related to 9 Microsoft patents.

In a statement regarding the action, Microsoft's corporate vice president and general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said:

"Microsoft has been a leader and innovator in the software industry for decades and continues to invest billions of dollars each year in bringing great software products and services to market. We have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard that investment, and therefore cannot stand idly by when others infringe our IP rights."

ZDNet reports that the complaint seeks damages for infringement in the following areas:

• "method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data"
• "system and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu"
• "method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display"
• "automated web site creation using template driven generation of active server page applications"
• "aggregation of system settings into objects"
• "timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information"
• "method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer"
• "system and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network"

The two sides have been in a long-running competition for a growing and lucrative CRM customer base - Saleforce.com through its SaaS model and its application framework Force.com, and Microsoft through its varied delivery options including its own Dynamics CRM Online offering, hosting ...