Microsoft-LinkedIn acquisition should face EU antitrust investigation, says Salesforce

Salesforce had also bid for LinkedIn to boost its CRM presence

US software juggernaut Salesforce has urged EU regulators to investigate antitrust issues relating to Microsoft's mammoth $26.2bn acquisition of professional social network LinkedIn.

Microsoft is hoping to get EU antitrust approval within the next few weeks in what is its largest ever purchase - and one of the biggest technology acquisitions ever.

Salesforce, which is led by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, had also bid for LinkedIn, and it claims that such a deal would be anti-competitive and give Microsoft an unfair advantage against its competitors.

"By gaining ownership of LinkedIn's unique dataset of over 450 million professionals in more than 200 countries, Microsoft will be able to deny competitors access to that data, and in doing so obtain an unfair competitive advantage," Burke Norton, Salesforce's chief legal officer, said in a statement to Reuters.

"Salesforce believes this raises significant antitrust and data privacy issues that need to be fully scrutinised by competition and data privacy authorities in the United States and in the European Union," he added.

Microsoft said that the deal had already been cleared to close in the US, Canada and Brazil.

"We're committed to continuing to work to bring price competition to a CRM market in which Salesforce is the dominant participant charging customers higher prices today," Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, said in a statement to Reuters.

The two companies have been going head-to-head for years with their CRM offerings, and the firms clearly both felt that combining their current datasets with the data that LinkedIn holds would give them more of an edge in the CRM market.

There are various ways in which Microsoft could use LinkedIn's data. By tightly knitting it together with Office 365 and Dynamics it could create a cloud service for firms that uses all three tools. People could quickly share contacts on LinkedIn for particular tasks, while jobseekers could update their CV on Word and LinkedIn simultaneously.

Integrating LinkedIn's Social graph with Microsoft's sales teams could help them to better target customers with an Office 365 subscription, for example. Perhaps most useful could be a workflow type document, in which LinkedIn could be used as a directory to source people to help with a certain document or PowerPoint presentation.