A month after launching a platform for processing machine-generated data, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is teaming up with General Electric Co. to promote its competing Predix system. The unexpected alliance was announced at the data center giant’s Discover summit in Las Vegas today and stands to provide a major competitive boost for both vendors.

For HPE, the partnership should help its salespeople better court organizations interested in harnessing the information coming off their connected devices. The vendor will be able to offer up its homegrown Universal IoT platform for everyday enterprise use cases, while selling Predix to the industrial companies that GE targets. Every deal in the latter category could create an opportunity to bundle its products with the conglomerate’s software and thereby secure revenue that might otherwise go to a different supplier.

To cement the proposition, GE plans on making HPE a “preferred” storage and server provider for on-premise Predix deployments. Meg Whitman’s firm will also supply the gear powering the cloud-based edition of the platform in a deal similar to the one it struck with Microsoft Corp. a few months ago. That should add up to a lot of hardware sales over time given the fast-growing number of industrial companies that are moving to tap their machine-generated data. And such organizations often times also require professional services to aid them with major technology projects, which creates yet another revenue opportunity for HPE.

For GE, meanwhile, the support of a top-tier IT vendor should go a long way towards widening the adoption of Predix. Besides actively prompting the platform to its customers and providing complementary solutions, HPE also intends to certify 100 of its developers in building industrial applications. The team will lend its expertise to organizations in the aerospace, oil and gas, utilities, manufacturing and automotive sectors, which are some some of GE’s most important markets.

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