After years of only supporting Salesforce.com, cloud unicorn Apttus Inc. is integrating its popular billing automation service with Microsoft Corp.’s competing Dynamics CRM platform. The move appears to be linked to the customer relationship management giant’s $360 million purchase of rival Steelbrick Inc. a few months ago.

The unexpected acquisition dramatically changed the balance of power in the Salesforce.com ecosystem. Whereas Apttus was the leader in its corner of the market prior to the purchase, it’s now finding itself having to compete with the very vendor that provided the launchpad for its success. The company’s position is made even more difficult by the fact that the acquisition of Steelbrick can potentially be interpreted to show some sort of preference on the part of Marc Benioff’s firm, which might influence some potential customers.

Nonetheless, the Salesforce.com ecosystem is large enough to accomdate multiple invoicing automation providers, especially when they’re targeting two different subsets of the vendor’s user base. Apttus has developed its platform with large enterprises in mind, while Steelbrick caters mainly to midsized companies that have less complicated billing requirements. The newly added support for Dynamics CRM will enable the company to better prepare for the event that the situation changes and tap a massive new market in the process: Microsoft claims that its platform is used by over four million workers at some 40,000 organizations around the world.

In conjunction, Apttus is also upping the ante against Steelbrick back in its home turf with the launch of new deep learning functionality designed to help users close deals more easily. The most notable addition is a recommendation engine called Quote-to-Cash Analytics that can generate customized recommendations on how to handle certain aspects of an invoice. Its advice is produced based on a combination of data about the customer being billed and historical activity logs collected from the top percentile of an organization’s salesforce.

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