Salesforce.com Inc. is certainly not keeping all of its eggs in one basket. Just over a month after participating in a record $108 million funding round into partner Apttus Inc., the cloud giant has bolstered the coffers of one of its biggest rivals as part of a $48 million investment announced this morning.

SteelBrick Inc. offers a competing billing management service that helps Salesforce.com users automate the massive amount of administrative work involved in handling an organization’s business transactions. That includes everything from creating and sending out invoices to making follow-ups if necessary and sorting out taxes.

That chore is even more tiresome for business-facing outfits, which make their living through large and complicated deals with a multiple of different variables factoring into the bill. A SteelBrick customer like storage vendor NetApp Inc., for instance, not only has to figure out how much to charge for the hardware that an organization is buying but also do the math on the software licenses, support contracts and other offerings included in the purchase.

And that’s even mentioning the financing options that the vendor offers to clients that don’t want to pay for everything at once. SteelBrick provides a neat environment for taking care of all those details that runs natively to Salesforce.com, allowing users to directly access the customer records they store in the cloud giant’s platform.

It’s more or less the exact same value proposition as Apttus is putting forth, save the target audience. SteelBrick chief executive Godard Abel told Forbes earlier this year after its first $18 million funding round, which also saw the participation of Salesforce.com, that his outfit built its service with small- and mid-size organizations in mind whereas its rival is focusing mainly on large enterprises.

That, the executive went on, provides SteelBrick with a broader market opportunity to address. But today’s funding round seems to paint a different picture. While certainly nothing to sniff at, $48 million is less than half of what its rival raised last month, a difference that grows even wider when comparing the company’s $77.5 million raised to date with Apttus’ $186 million.

Of course, it could simply be that SteelBrick doesn’t need that much funding to support its growth, which seems to be the case judging by its performance figures: The company claims to have tripled bookings over the past year on the back more than 200 new additions to its customer base. Either way, Salesforce.com is hedging its bets.

Image via DasWortgewand