The recent hiring of former Rackspace (RAX) executive Mark Interrante as its new senior vice president of Engineering for HP Cloud not only shows Hewlett-Packard‘s (HPQ) commitment to the cloud, but also a renewed commitment to the OpenStack project. As Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, noted in a recent blog post, Interrante joining HP is an indication the vendor’s presence in the OpenStack community is only going to grow further.

In his new role, Interrante is responsible for the research and development around HP Helion OpenStack products, public cloud offerings and HP’s still relatively new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and development platforms. As noted last week right here on Talkin’ Cloud, Interrante left Rackspace in March; and prior to departing, he was the company’s senior vice president of products and engineering.

Interrante was also a key player in the early development of OpenStack, which was a joint effort between Rackspace and NASA. Although he obviously didn’t do it alone, Interrante helped to create what has become a significant platform in the private cloud space.

But what does this mean for HP going forward?

King told Talkin’ Cloud that Interrante’s hiring is “a strengthening of an already forceful existing strategy.”

“HP is the No. 2 code contributor to OpenStack, has two execs sitting on the group’s board of directors and numerous HP employees chair OpenStack committees,” King said. “Adding someone who has such deep insight into and hands-of experience reiterates HP’s dedication to OpenStack. But the hire also reflects well on HP’s efforts since it seems unlikely that Interrante would have joined an organization he didn’t respect.”

Interrante’s hiring will strengthen HP’s cloud efforts and its strategy around Helion, but King said it should also “bolster HP’s reputation for R&D innovation, and help continue the industry momentum around OpenStack.”

What comes next? It seems safe to assume OpenStack and Helion will continue to be core to HP’s existing cloud strategy. And with a mind like Interrante’s now on board, HP could do even more innovative things in its cloud R&D center.