"When people build applications, they take their project, figure out what technologies they need to bring to bear. Very rarely is it one single product from one single company," he said.

Adobe's emerging rival in the rich Internet application space is Microsoft's Silverlight.

While Silverlight is already "quite viable," it's understandable that Salesforce.com would align itself with Flash, said Michael Coté, an analyst with Redmonk. "Flash is still the leader in this area simply because [Adobe has] been there so long."

However, he added, "you can tell Microsoft is hell-bent on catching up. .... Microsoft will close that gap pretty quickly."