Microsoft Sued Salesforce for Patent Violation

Microsoft sued against Salesforce for the violation of nine unspecified Microsoft CRM related patents. Microsoft posted the incident of legal action on its Web site on May 18. Microsoft and Salesforce are competitors in the cloud-based CRM space. They also rival each other in the CRM developer space because Microsoft tries to push its xrm platform to compete with Salesforce’s Force.com platform. The following is an excerpt from that statement from Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing:

“Microsoft has filed an action today, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, against Salesforce.com for infringement of nine Microsoft patents by their CRM product.”

Mary Jo Foley, the Technical writer of ZDNet asked Microsoft and Salesforce for further information. Salesforce declined to make any further comment. Microsoft officials didn’t provide any additional information other than what they provided at its web site. Mary also describes the patents below on which Microsoft is claiming Salesforce is violating.

• “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”