Hewlett-Packard announced the launch of a new Center of Excellence that develops best practices for HANA and the SAP Business Suite, a catalog of applications built on top of the analytics engine.

“To succeed, organizations need to make fast, informed decisions by extracting large amounts of raw data from their systems to turn it into information that is meaningful,” said Bill Veghte, chief operating officer, HP. “The HP Center of Excellence delivers the depth of expertise and services to help organizations drive high-performance data analysis, handling huge volumes of data in real time for instant business insight.”

The CoE will focus on several specific areas to promote the end goal of getting more organizations to adopt HANA, and buy Hewlett-Packard hardware to run it on.

First and foremost, the facility will serve as an extension of HP Labs. The on-site engineers are already working on something called Project Kraken, a single image development platform for SAP ERP and CRM apps that tap into HANA. The 8-terabyte deployment is a” forerunner to the large memory systems scheduled for future availability.”

The CoE’s other purpose will be offering services to local clientele. According to HP this means help desk support courtesy of the company’s multilingual network of experts; application development and QA; and a standard services line-up for HANA. The latter includes migration, implementation of SAP Rapid Deployment solutions, and deployment of in-memory databases at both on-premise and remote client sites.

HP is turning its attention to bolstering its services line-up for one simple reason: selling technical know-how to businesses is a lot more profitable than selling PCs to consumers. I reported earlier this month that CEO Meg Whitman is on the prowl for opportunities to trim fat and reallocate resources to high-margin businesses.