Portland, Oregon. Photo via Radworld

Seattle has experienced a boom in new engineering and development offices from Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Facebook, Zynga, Splunk and eBay. Now, the Portland area is getting in on the action.

Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian reports that Salesforce.com has chosen the Rose City for a new office, with plans to hire hundreds of people in the coming years. In fact, the growth plan could include as many as 500 people in Oregon by the end of next year. Rogoway notes that the arrival of Salesforce.com could be one of the biggest infusions of tech jobs in the city with a company spokesman noting that the Portland community “really jibes with the San Francisco feel and the culture that Salesforce has.”

“We looked at a number of cities across the US, and chose Portland for several reasons including its incredible talent pool and proximity to our headquarters in San Francisco,” Salesforce.com spokesman Andrew Schmitt tells GeekWire. “We are currently exploring real-estate options, but have nothing to report at this time.” The company expects to hire in areas such as software development, IT, finance, human resources and support.

The arrival of Salesforce.com is certainly a big win for the Portland area, which has claimed a large operation of Intel since the 1970s. The company, which  boasts a market value of $20.9 billion, has been expanding rapidly with the recent acquisitions of Buddy Media and Stypi. It already operates a small engineering center in downtown Seattle.

In fact, the company bolstered that office earlier this year when it acquired Seattle TechStars’ grad ThinkFuse. We have an email into Salesforce.com to get a better sense of the size of the Seattle office, and its growth plans.

UPDATE: We heard back from Salesforce.com’s Schmitt who offered this vague answer to our questions about the Seattle office and its growth plans.

“Sorry, nothing to announce in Seattle at this time,” he said. That’s an interesting response in part because it suggests that the company may have something to announce in the future. The company first set up shop in Seattle at the West 8th building in October 2008, taking about 12,000 square feet at the time.

We’ve heard the office is relatively small in size at this time, though Schmitt declined to say how many people work there.

Previously on GeekWire: From Facebook to Zynga: A guide to the tech giants establishing Seattle outposts

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