Salesforce.com has secured new office space in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood, marking the latest California tech giant to establish a beachhead in the region as the war for top technical talent increases. Just last week, news leaked that social gaming powerhouse Zynga was hiring Web engineers in Seattle for a new development center. That followed announcements by Facebook and Hulu, which each have chosen Seattle for new engineering centers in the past six months. Google set up shop in the Seattle area in 2004, and now employs more than 600 people here.

Salesforce.com's new office will be located in the West 8th building at the corner of Westlake Avenue and 8th and Virginia Streets, just a stone's throw from Amazon.com's new headquarters, TechFlash has learned. The San Francisco-based company -- one of the world's biggest providers of online-based customer relationship management software -- has leased about 12,000 square feet in the 500,000 square foot building. [Post updated with comments from Salesforce.com]

Other tenants in the building -- with sweeping views of Elliott Bay, The Space Needle and the Olympic mountain range -- include The Casey Family Foundation and Children's Hospital.

It is unclear when Salesforce plans to occupy the space or how many people will work there. However, companies typically allocate about 150 square feet per employee, which means the space has enough room to accommodate as many as 80 workers.

We've reached out to Salesforce about the new office, and we'll update the post when we hear more.

The influx of Silicon Valley companies setting up offices in Seattle comes at an interesting time.

The lobby at West 8th

Many leaders in the high-tech community have argued that the passage of Initiative 1098 -- which would impose an income tax on individuals making more than $200,000 -- would harm the region by making it harder to recruit the best and brightest engineers and entrepreneurs.

Salesforce.com has a market value of $13.6 billion, and posted second quarter revenue of $394 million. The company, and its outspoken CEO Marc Benioff, have been engaged in ongoing battles with Microsoft throughout the years.

Salesforce and Microsoft recently settled a patent suit, a dispute which prompted Benioff to call Microsoft one of the "alley thugs" of the tech industry.

Update: Woodson Martin, senior vice president in the office of the CEO at Salesforce.com, offered this statement:

“The greater Seattle area is an amazing place, with world-class people, culture and environment. Salesforce.com taking additional office space in Seattle will help us attract top talent in that area to respond to the worldwide demand for enterprise cloud computing.”

In a follow-up interview with TechFlash, Martin said that the "sky is the limit" in terms of hiring in the Seattle area.

"It is a huge talent market for the profiles that we are after, so we are grabbing as much space as we can get right now and we will get more space when we need more," said Martin. "Our view is that we are going to grow, and we are going to place as many teams in Seattle and as many engineers there as we can attract."

The company has already moved in to the office, but Martin didn't want to disclose the leadership team at the new facility just yet.

He called the Seattle office a "strategic target area" for the company. The company's job board currently has more than 20 openings in Seattle.

"We are after the best and brightest software engineers in the industry, and a heck of a lot of those people live in the Seattle area. That's why we are there," he said.