Hewlett-Packard Co. may have been late to the party for the OpenStack cloud computing platform, but it’s trying to make up for lost time.

The company just rolled out a dedicated consultancy practice that will focus exclusively on helping customer implement the open-source cloud platform in their environments. The launch of the unit comes on the heels of Teradata Corp.’s acquisition of Think Big Analytics Inc., a top provider of professional services for Hadoop, which is another fast-growing community project that also suffers from a talent shortage.

The deal, in turn, followed shortly after HP started offering customers assistance with setting up the batch processing framework and integrating it into their existing systems. The company’s new Helion OpenStack Professional Services portfolio offers a similar value proposition that  spans the deployment lifecycle, beginning with the initial assessment phase.

That part involves HP sending out consultants to work with customers on formulating business goals for their projects and mapping out the best course of action to achieve them. Once the perimeters have been set,  a small pilot environment is built to demonstrate the concept to decision makers. If everything goes according to HP’s plan, it then lands the contract to deploy OpenStack into production, which includes integrating it with legacy systems.

HP hopes to cash in on the maintenance business as well. It will offer remote capacity and performance monitoring services, patch management and round-the-clock support. It also offers to train IT staffers and partners in how to manage OpenStack.

The launch more or more or less completes the circle on Helion, the OpenStack-powered hybrid cloud portfolio that HP introduced earlier this year. But while the company may now boast one of the single most comprehensive value propositions in the project’s ecosystem, it’s still playing catch-up behind the competition with its commercial OpenStack distribution, which has yet to hit general availability.  The addition of professional services to the Helion lineup ticks an important box on the Helion development checklist, but HP still has work to do to be perceived as a major player.

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