The rumor-mill kicked into overdrive on Wednesday when Bloomberg reported Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) is working with financial advisers after being approached by a potential buyer. Not only is the company one of the largest cloud computing businesses around, but Bloomberg reports it would be the largest software company takeover ever. The company's market cap was at $40 billion before the rumors started and drove the stock price up more than 11 percent Wednesday. There’s a short list of buyers large enough to pull off a deal of this magnitude — and the Puget Sound region’s very own Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is at the top. There are some pretty important caveats here: Bloomberg’s report came from unnamed sources who, even themselves, said it’s possible the talks won’t go anywhere.

Furthermore, no one familiar with the negotiations is naming Microsoft as that potential buyer and there are plenty of other tech giants considered to be in the running. But, it makes a lot of sense that Microsoft could be that mystery buyer. First off, Microsoft has $95 billion in cash on hand, so the price tag isn't an issue. You may remember I included a Microsoft-Salesforce.com merger as my “money-ball” pick for 2015 predictions. The same reasons I thought it made sense in January are why I think it still makes sense today. The two companies have been working together since they announced a massive partnership last year that connected Salesforce's customer management applications with Microsoft's Office and Windows.

The cloud is clearly where Microsoft is investing for the future of its business, so it's not a crazy idea that it would grow its offerings by acquiring a company it's already working with. Salesforce has 16,000 employees, so Microsoft would be acquiring an army of cloud coders. When Microsoft talks about its cloud, it doesn’t just talk about the servers sitting in datacenters around the globe. It talks about the services it offers on top of that hardware, such as Office 365's productivity tools. Even during the earnings report last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella compared Microsoft’s cloud to Amazon’s and said Microsoft's cloud services distinguish it from its competitors.

Acquiring Salesforce would take those services to a whole new level. Nadella and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff highlighted just how well the two companies complement each other when they met to pose for photo ops during the partnership announcement last May. “This announcement is about taking Microsoft’s core strategy, Office 365 and Windows, and integrating it with Salesforce’s core strategy, our CRM apps, and making a combined offering that offers more value to our users,” Benioff said back then. "The reason that these relationships work is because Microsoft’s core strategy is Windows and Office, that’s where the revenue comes from," Benioff added. "And Salesforce’s core strategy is our CRM apps. That’s where our revenue comes from. And we both want to grow our revenues, so we know that we need to be investing in our core and in our strategies."

Salesforce, which is headquartered in San Francisco, is one of the biggest and best in the business of cloud applications. The company's headquarters building, which is under construction in San Francisco right now, will be the tallest on the West Coast when it's finished. It will be 1,070 feet, which will knock the 937-foot tall Columbia Center from second-tallest on the West Coast to third, behind Los Angeles' U.S. Bank tower. Salesforce will occupy more than half of the 61-story San Francisco building. An office of that size in the Bay area would give Microsoft a huge recruiting advantage as competition for tech talent gets fierce.