Hewlett Packard today announced a closed beta of HP Cloud Services; the company’s attempt to compete at scale with Amazon’s market dominating Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering. HP is claiming “integration of OpenStack,” but GigaOM’s Derrick Harris is amongst those questioning the extent to which HP’s new baby is relying upon the open source code. One of OpenStack’s promises was interoperability; the ability to move from a Rackspace cloud to a Dell cloud to an HP cloud, all powered by the same codebase. If — as appears the case here — HP has tweaked and fiddled, and built dependencies to their own hardware and software, that interoperability will be very limited. Derrick concludes, “when beta users start talking and when HP opens the doors on its cloud services to the public, then we’ll see how HP really stacks up as a cloud computing provider.” Indeed.