Salesforce.com will boost hiring in Chicago by 200 jobs and reportedly will add "hundreds" of jobs in the next several months as it opens an outpost near Portland, Ore. In Chicago, Salesforce will nearly double its workforce and set up its Midwest sales office in the River North neighborhood – near the Merchandise Mart that will be Motorola Mobility's new home. The company will be eligible for $10.4 million in payroll tax credits from the state over 10 years and some training funds, based on meeting its hiring goals. Sales engineers and technical solution architects are among the positions it lists there. The company has not announced a location near Portland, but local government agencies indicate it likely will choose a site in the western suburbs of Washington County. Intel and Nike are located nearby in the Beaverton area. Its competitor, Jive Software, also has 200 workers in the area, though it moved its headquarters to Palo Alto, Calif., in 2010. The company is already recruiting locally, though. In a post for an event earlier this week, it said it was looking for "Java, force.com, and mobile developers to build internal tools for our employee community." Its website lists both Portland and Beaverton among its work sites. At that event, the company indicated it could have 500 employees in the Portland area by the end of next year. Salesforce spokesman Andrew Schmitt told Oregon Live there is no firm hiring target yet, but it could become quite a large operation. "We're kind of having a phased approach," he said. "If all goes well it could be lots of hundreds." The company recently acquired Buddy Media and Stypi. In addition to customer relationship management software, the company is moving into software for human resources and marketing. It's also taking a deeper dive into HTML5 as a user interface and development standard, Computerworld reports. Related Links: Salesforce.com to double Chicago workforce, move to new River North digs [Crain's Chicago Business] Salesforce.com plans major Oregon outpost, promises 'hundreds' of jobs [Oregon Live] Salesforce.com's future includes a marketing cloud, deeper Workday links and more HTML5 [Computerworld]