Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. has announced that it’s selling the bulk of its OpenStack and Cloud Foundry assets to Linux provider SUSE for an undisclosed sum.

The deal will also see SUSE acquire some of HPE’s employees when it closes in the first quarter of 2017.

The deal is complicated by the fact that SUSE’s parent company Micro Focus International plc is currently in the process of merging with HPE’s Software Division, following an $8.8 billion deal announced back in September.

Once the deal is completed, SUSE will use HPE’s OpenStack and Cloud Foundry assets to improve its own SUSE OpenStack Cloud, and also bring to market a new SUSE Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service solution. In addition, SUSE will upgrade its Cloud Foundry Foundation membership, taking a seat on the organization’s board.

Meanwhile, HPE has said SUSE will become its “preferred open-source partner” for Linux, OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, as it bids to revamp its own hybrid cloud strategy.

“We are evolving our investment strategy to focus on developing the next generation of hybrid cloud solutions, which combines HPE technology with a broad ecosystem of open source and partner technologies that support traditional and cloud native applications,” Ric Lewis, general manager of HPE’s Software-Defined and Cloud Group, said in a statement announcing the deal.

The partners said that one of their main goals will be to overcome the complexity issues that have plagued OpenStack deployments in multi-cloud scenarios.

The deal could potentially benefit both companies and their partners, said Ashish Nadkarni, program director for computing platforms at International Data Corp.

“SUSE has proven time and again it can successfully work with its technology partners to help organizations glean maximum benefit from their investments in open source,” Nadkarni said. “SUSE is positioning itself very well as a high-growth company with the resources it needs to compete in key market segments.”

Back in September of this year, SUSE’s parent company Micro Focus said it was merging with HPE’s software business in an $8.8 billion deal to create a market-leading pure-play software infrastructure vendor. The deal will see SUSE’s OpenStack technology paired with HPE’s Helion OpenStack service and Stackato platform. Meanwhile, this week’s deal contains a “non-exclusive agreement” to include SUSE’s Cloud Foundry solution in HPE’s Helion offering.

For HPE, the deal allows it to sharpen its focus on building out its hybrid cloud infrastructure offerings, and also new data-driven approaches to computing such as the memory-driven “Machine” architecture it showed off earlier this week. Previously, HPE said that selling off its “non-core assets” would allow it to focus more on providing hybrid information technology infrastructure for data centers that can bridge to multi-cloud environments.

Bobby Patrick, chief marketing officer for HPE Cloud, and Bryan Gartner, senior technology strategist at SUSE, appeared on SiliconANGLE’s TV show theCUBE earlier this week at HPE Discover EU in London, where they discussed in greater detail how the two companies are integrating their offerings.

(*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)