Microsoft scored a major coup yesterday when it snatched Hewlett-Packard Inc. out of the arms of Salesforce.com Inc., signing it up on a multi-year contract to use its Dynamics CRM and Office 365 products.

According to a press release announcing the deal, HP plans to deploy Microsoft’s customer relationship management platform across thousands of its staff members for a period of six years. The release notes that HP will also use Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

The bigger story is that Microsoft stole HP from its main rival in the CRM space, Salesforce. It also scored a victory against Oracle Corp., which had until now been HP’s main service software provider. Salesforce will hurt from losing HP, because it notably bragged about the relationship in its marketing literature, while company has also featured heavily at its annual Dreamforce conference.

Although Salesforce will be miffed, the move doesn’t come as a major surprise. HP, which is focused on selling printers and PCs following the split from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), has enjoyed close relations with Microsoft for years by virtue of Windows being the leading computer operating system. The deal will see HP’s 6,500 sales staff plus around 20,000 service employees worldwide use Microsoft’s Dynamics software.

Because HP has around 50,000 employees on its books, that means around half of its staff won’t be using Dynamics. But it’s likely that the vast majority will be using Office 365, which is an essential tool for just about any corporate employee.

HP’s move is notable because there’s always a degree of risk when signing onto such a massive deal. Whether the decision was taken because HP feels Dynamics is a superior CRM to Salesforce’s offering, or because Microsoft made an offer the company couldn’t refuse, is not yet clear.

Whatever the motive for the move, Microsoft is sure to celebrate it as another big win for its burgeoning cloud ecosystem. The company only recently surpassed Salesforce as the No. 1 one vendor in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), according to a recent report from Synergy Research Group, which also noted that Microsoft is fast catching up in the CRM segment too.

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