For its patent-infringement countersuit against Microsoft, Salesforce. com has brought on David Boies on its legal team - Boies, a key figure from Microsoft's past, has already represented the Justice Department in its antitrust action against the software giant.

In its June 24-filed countersuit against Microsoft, Salesforce has alleged that Microsoft products - including .NET and SharePoint collaboration software - infringe on five of Salesforce's patents, issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office between 2004 and 2007.

Salesforce's counter-complaint comes in response to Microsoft's own last-month-filed intellectual-property lawsuit; in which it accused Salesforce of violating nine Microsoft patents by their CRM product.

With Salesforce bringing on Boies as legal counsel, Microsoft is bound to feel a bit unnerved - more so because Boies, arguing the government's case in the Justice Department's landmark antitrust suit against Microsoft, has accused Microsoft of maintaining an illegal monopoly in the PC arena.

In fact, other than legal counsel aspect, a number of analysts believe that the Microsoft-Salesforce scuffle clearly suggests the significance of cloud has increased considerably for both the enterprise and consumers.

In a June 28 interview with eWEEK, Altimeter Group analyst Ray Wang said: "In the battle for the cloud, the two leaders are going to be Salesforce and Microsoft. Microsoft's Azure is the .NET side of the war, while Salesforce is the Java side. So you're going to have drama."