David Boies

If summer is the season for sequels, the tech industry just got a blockbuster. Salesforce.com filed its own patent lawsuit against Microsoft overnight, effectively responding to the complaint filed by the Redmond company last month with some allegations of its own.

And there's a familiar name among the lawyers representing the San Francisco-based cloud-computing company: David Boies, the high-profile lawyer who represented the U.S. Justice Department in its landmark antitrust case against the company. Say this for Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: He has a flair for the dramatic.

The Salesforce suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware, cites five patents held by Salesforce.com, alleging that they are violated by Microsoft products including Windows Server AppFabric, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft SharePoint, ASP.Net Web Services, and the Windows Live authentication system. The suit seeks triple monetary damages, citing Microsoft's "willful infringement."

Here's a copy of the complaint: PDF, 12 pages. Bloomberg News was first to spot the filing and break the story this morning.

"We are reviewing Salesforce.com's filing, which we have just received," said Horacio Gutierrez, a Microsoft corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, in a statement released by the company. "We remain confident about our position and will continue to press ahead with the complaint we initiated in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington."

Following Microsoft's suit, the outspoken Benioff called the Redmond company one of the "alley thugs" of the tech industry, saying during a Salesforce earnings call that he was "disappointed to see this from a former leader of our industry."

Earlier this week, he said at a conference, “I guess you know you’ve made it in software when Microsoft is protesting your event. Or maybe when they’ve sued you. This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened in my career.”

(Photo of Boies by Doc Searls.)