Much like counterpart Satya Nadella at Microsoft Corp., Meg Whitman isn’t letting old rivalries stand in the way of her growth plans. Just over a month after announcing plans to shut down Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) struggling public cloud, the chief executive has revealed a partnership with Redmond to fill the gap with its once competing Azure infrastructure-as-a-service platform. The software giant is the natural choice to take on the role.

While Azure is only the second largest public cloud behind Amazon Web Services according to Gartner Inc.’s latest estimates, Microsoft and HPE enjoy a close relationship in several key areas that provides a valuable foundation for expansion. Most notable is their partnership in the data center, where many of the hardware giant’s servers run Windows applications such as Exchange and SQL Server. The new alliance will is set to extend that collaboration to hybrid infrastructure that combines on- and off-premise hardware, a major strategic focus for both companies.

Although Whitman didn’t provide any specifics in the earnings call during which she announced the move, it’s safe to assume that the effort will somehow include Microsoft’s Cloud Platform System, a standalone implementation of Azure that allows customers to run its core services behind the firewall on partner-supplied machines. HP was one of the first vendors to sign up when the offering was first announced in 2010 but quietly pulled out shortly thereafter to focus on its homegrown infrastructure-as-a-service offering, leaving Dell Inc. as the only major supplier to offer appliances running the software. Breaking that monopoly is an obvious first priority.

From there, HPE will likely start adding support and perhaps even introduce professional services for rivaling platforms like Amazon’s. That would put the company on the same trajectory as its long-time rival, which launched a provider-agnostic service marketplace last year with the ambitious goal of establishing itself as the lynchpin of organizations’ hybrid cloud infrastructure. The question now is which of the two technology giants will reach the goal first.

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