According to a Bloomberg News report, the patent-infringement scuffle between enterprise software as a service (SaaS) bigwig Salesforce. com and software giant Microsoft intensified further on Friday, with Salesforce filing a patent infringement countersuit against Microsoft, accusing that Microsoft’s products like .Net and Sharepoint infringe on Salespoint’s patents.

Going by the Bloomberg report, Salesforce has claimed that the mentioned Microsoft products perform in such a way that Salesforce’s patents are violated. Salesforce has further added that the “risk of infringement was either known or so obvious that it should have been known by Microsoft.”

The Salesforce countersuit, filed in a Delaware district court on Friday, comes over a month after Microsoft’s May 18-filed a patent infringement lawsuit, claiming that the creation of menus and interface components for Salesforce’s flagship hosted customer relationship management (CRM) application infringes nine Microsoft patents.

In its statement pertaining to the lawsuit against Salesforce, Microsoft had said that since the company invests billions of dollars per year for developing software and services, it has “a responsibility to our customers, partners and shareholders to safeguard that investment, and therefore cannot stand idly by when others infringe our IP rights.”

Incidentally, while Microsoft and Salesforce are generally battling individually against other rival platforms for the potentially vast cloud computing software market, both the companies are neck-and-neck in the Software-as-a-Service CRM applications’ arena.