Microsoft has legal proceedings with Salesforce.com for infringement of patent for the CRM system

Microsoft accuses the largest system provider of customer relationship management, Salesforce.com company, in violation of the rights to nine patents of Microsoft and requires to exclude the found violations from functionality of CRM systems.

The Salesforce.com company founded in 1999 in San Francisco is engaged in development and implementation of the CRM systems provided on the basis of a subscription. Salesforce.com is a competitor of Microsoft corporation in the field of the corporate software. Microsoft, in particular, delivers the systems of the Microsoft Dynamics family which includes including the CRM system.

According to Ray Vanga (Ray Wang), analytics of Altimeter Group, in increasing frequency solutions of a line Microsoft Dynamics compete with the Salesforce.com systems. In the long term with development of both product lines this competition will strongly escalate.

The Segment of CRM systems is the most fast-growing segment of business world market the software with an annual capacity of 7-8 billion dollars. And Salesforce.com is the largest supplier of the "cloud" CRM systems which sales in 2009 exceeded 1.3 billion dollars.

Commenting on a situation with patent infringement, Horacio Gutierrez, the deputy general adviser of Microsoft concerning intellectual property and to licensing, said that within decades of Microsoft he is the leader and the innovator in the industry of the software and invests annually billions of dollars in development of software products and services. Microsoft cannot remain indifferent when the intellectual property rights of the company are violated.

In Salesforce.com said that last year the "large technology company" claiming that Salesforce.com violated patents contacted them. Now the companies conduct negotiations. According to representatives of Salesforce.com, court's decision should not affect considerably long-term results of a company performance, however it will have an impact on financial results about two next quarters.