The flood of machine-generated data from the Internet of Things is one of the primary drivers behind the accelerating adoption of non-relational systems touted as both flexible and scalable enough to keep pace with the explosion in connected devices. MongoDB, the company behind the popular open source document store of the same, is riding the trend.

The company this week announced a partnership with the software development subsidiary of Germany’s Bosch Group, one  of largest maker of automotive components and home appliances in the world, to deliver applications that can take advantage of real-time sensory information. The alliance represents a major strategic landmark for both firms.

From MongoDB’s standpoint, the collaboration comes as another validation of its value proposition, which is founded on the notion that traditional relational databases sold by the likes of Oracle are simply not cut out to support the Internet of Things.

“What people have been looking for is a database that is more agile than the relational database, more scalable and works well in cloud-style scale-out architectures. And neither of those is a natural fit for the relational database, which was invented in the 1970s for an entirely different requirement,” MongoDB CEO Max Schireson noted in an exclusive interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE during a company event last year.

“Over the last decade in particular, a lot has changed about the way people develop software and the type of software that they’re developing,” Schireson added. “Whereas most applications used to be internal, now a large portion of applications go out and touch organizations’ customers and much more intimate parts of their business.”

Bosch hopes that the partnership with MongoDB will help it respond to that paradigm shift in time. With sensors already beginning to proliferate throughout the manufacturing lifecycle thanks to the efforts of GE and Google acquiring connected device firm Nest earlier year, missing the connected device train would be risking two of its largest revenue streams. The firm has no intention of being left in the dust.

Bosch Software is using MongoDB as the backend for an upcoming portfolio of applications meant to enable the secure integration of new categories of connected devices into existing business processes, the company said. The suite is being designed to serve as a software foundation on which custom apps can be built to address specific business needs such as fleet management and predictive maintenance. GE is promising to provide the exact same functionality with Predix, a Hadoop-based platform for managing machine-generated data and incorporating it into value-added services that it introduced last year.

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