Salesforce.com Pays Microsoft to Settle Patent Suit

Microsoft announced today that it has settled the patent infringement cases brought by Microsoft before the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and by Salesforce.com in the U.S. District Court of Delaware.

Microsoft sued Salesforce for patent infringement in May, which was soon followed by a counter-suit from Salesforce in June.  Targets of Microsoft’s suit included patents such as "method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data" and "system and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu", while the Salesforce suit included patents it claimed were violated through Windows Server AppFabric, SharePoint, and the .NET platform.

The cases have been settled through a patent agreement in which Salesforce.com will receive broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for its products and services as well as its back-end server infrastructure during the term. Also as part of the agreement, Microsoft receives coverage under Salesforce.com’s patent portfolio for Microsoft’s products and services.

Although the contents of the agreement have not been disclosed, Microsoft indicated that it is being compensated by Salesforce.com based on the strength of Microsoft’s leading patent portfolio in the areas of operating systems, cloud services and customer relationship management software.

“We are pleased to reach this agreement with Salesforce.com to put an end to the litigation between our two companies,” said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft. “Microsoft’s patent portfolio is the strongest in the software industry and is the result of decades of software innovation. ...