Microsoft is accusing one of its former managers of breaking a non-competition agreement and leaving the company with around 600 MB in confidential information.Last month, the software giant sued Matt Miszewski, a former market development manager with its CRM and online services division, in order to prevent him from accepting a position at Salesforce.com.
Salesforce is one of Microsoft's primary competitors on the hosted customer relationship management (CRM) solutions market and the Windows maker claims that Miszewski has signed an agreement preventing him from accepting a job from a rival company.
The judge sided with Microsoft and issued a temporary restraining order preventing the former Microsoft manager from starting work as senior vice president at Salesforce.
Microsoft is now trying to make that decision permanent and last week filed a motion alleging that, despite claiming otherwise, when he left the company, on December 31, 2010, Miszewski took with him over 900 files consisting of business plans for 2011.
The company's lawyers said in the motion that the documents "
would be highly valuable to Microsoft's competitors, including Salesforce.com, both in terms of capitalizing on Microsoft's efforts to prepare these materials, as well as revealing in detail Microsoft's own competitive strategies."
The software company claims that allowing its former manager to go work for Salesforce would cause it significant damages because of the knowledge he has about Microsoft's operations.
"
This case involves an employee with knowledge of Microsoft's sensitive customer and competitive information going to work for Salesforce.com, a direct competitor, in a job that is focused on the same solutions and customers," Microsoft's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for litigation David Howard said in a statement.
According to
V3.co.uk, so far Salesforce declined to comment on the case, saying that it is against company policy. Miszewski didn't respond to requests for comment either.
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