Shares in Salesforce.com Inc. surged Tuesday after a report emerged that Microsoft Corp. might be interested in the software as a service (SaaS) CRM firm.

Bloomberg claimed that “people with knowledge of the matter” say that the Redmond, Washington, based tech giant is currently evaluating a bid to buy Salesforce, after reports emerged late April that the company had hired bankers to evaluate any potential takeover offers.

It was noted though that no formal bid or even contact between the companies had yet taken place.

Although Microsoft competes with Salesforce with its Dynamics CRM software, the companies have played nicely together in the past, having signed a deal in 2014 that saw integration of Salesforce’s cloud software with Microsoft’s Windows OS and Office 365.

The obvious buyer

With Oracle previously having stated that they weren’t interested in acquiring Salesforce (although that may change,) and SAP also saying it wasn’t interested, Microsoft continues to remain the obvious buyer.

Microsoft’s pivot away from its legacy desktop offerings to the cloud under Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has been paying dividends for the company, but a killer, market leading offering from Salesforce would take Microsoft’s cloud services to the next level; it may be one piece of a larger jigsaw puzzle of products and services, but it’s an awfully big one.

The mystery though remains as to who approached Salesforce initially about a possible takeover bid, the move that sparked all of this. If Oracle and SAP are off the table, and it wasn’t Microsoft, that would only leave the likes of Google, Amazon, and possibly even IBM or HP.

Shares in Salesforce surged as much as 3 percent on the news before closing the day up 1.61% at $72.75 with a market cap of $45 billion, making a potential acquisition price (allowing for a premium) of around $50 billion.

Microsoft shares closed down on the news 1.3 percent to $47.60.

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