Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. are no strangers to poaching from one another, but the rivalry has so far been mostly limited to customers. The fight escalated to the board room this week with the revelation that the former vice president of Redmond’s burgeoning customer relationship management business, Bob Stutz, has left to head up the analytics operations of its rival in a defection that may signal a shift in the already rocky relationship of the two technology giants.

Satya Nadella put an end to Microsoft’s public fued with Salesforce.com shortly after taking the helm last year by reportedly agreeing to a request from his counterpart, Marc Benioff, to hire away one of his top infrastructure engineers as a show of trust. The deal laid down the foundation for the landmark partnership that the companies struck two months ago to integrate a handful of their most important enterprise services, but the competition in the customer relationship management segment never stopped. Quite the opposite, in the fact.

It was only two weeks ago that Microsoft publicized the new capabilities included in the next release of its Dynamics CRM suite, which targets Salesforce.com’s growing selection of data processing capabilities with new machine learning functionality for understanding customers. The announcement was ironically published by none other than Stutz himself, whose appointment as Marc Benioff’s analytics lieutenant constitutes a direct blow to Redmond. But customers probably won’t end up feeling the impact.

Microsoft has already tapped Jujhar Singh, who served as the executive’s head of engineering, to fill his former’s boss shoes. He will now report directly to Scott Guthrie, the head of Redmond’s enterprise cloud services division, while Stutz is set to work under Salesforce.com president of products Alex Dayon.

Photo via Microsoft