Salesforce. com Inc. was accused of infringing nine patents for ways to make software more efficient and was consequently sued by Microsoft Corp. yesterday.

The complaint is focused on customer-relationship management (CRM) software, which is the trademark of Salesforce. com’s business. The complaint seeks order that would stop Salesforce. com from providing features that Microsoft claims that it had invented.

Salesforce. com was founded in 1999 and it sells subscriptions to Internet business software that runs marketing campaigns and tracks sales leads. It gives a competition to Microsoft’s Dynamics programs in the CRM market. According to the complaint, filed in federal court in Seattle, it has made profit through infringement of the Microsoft patents-in-suit.

Ray Wang, an analyst with Altimeter Group in San Mateo, California said, “More and more, we’re seeing Dynamics compete with Salesforce in deals. Long term, Salesforce and Microsoft are on a collision course for all enterprise software”.

He added that CRM is the fastest-growing part of corporate-software market, with a value of $7 billion to $8 billion a year. Last year, Salesforce. com earned more than $1.3 billion in sales.

Horacio Gutierrez, the Redmond, Washington-based Company’s Deputy General Counsel for intellectual property and licensing revealed that Microsoft “cannot stand idly by when others infringe” our intellectual property rights. For decades, Microsoft has been a leader and tends to invest billions of dollars to introduce great software products and services to market.