When Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. sold the bulk of its OpenStack assets to SUSE at the end of last year, you could be forgiven for thinking the company was done and dusted with the platform. But it turns out that that’s not so, for the company has just announced HPE Helion OpenStack 5.0 platform, which it developed in partnership with SUSE.

The announcement came at the OpenStack Summit in Boston Wednesday. The company said the new release is based on the OpenStack Newton codebase that came out last year. According to HPE, the Helion OpenStack 5.0 platform is targeted at companies looking to make private cloud the core of their hybrid infrastructure, offering the agility and reliability they need for improved economics, performance and time-to-market, while getting the most out of their existing data centers.

HPE said Helion OpenStack 5.0 has been designed for greater scalability than the original Newton release. It also offers more resilience and supports a wider range of workloads, the company said. Native software container orchestration is also included, so users can run self-service containers on Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos.

There’s also a new bare-metal multi-tenant networking set up which makes it possible for OpenStack regions to be shared securely, enabling users to mix bare metal and virtualized compute nodes within them. Finally, there’s integration with SUSE’s Ceph object storage service, which enables storage for unstructured data that can be managed independently of OpenStack, the company said.

HPE is using the release to play up its recently formed technology services organization, HPE Pointnext, which was created in March and combines the company’s support and consultation services. In a blog post, HPE product marketing manager Brian Besand pitched Pointnext as an option for those who don’t want to worry about the hassle of installing and managing OpenStack, promising “flawless and on-time implementation, on-budget execution, and creative configurations,” with the managed offering.

This is in line with what Bobby Patrick, chief marketing officer of HPE Cloud, said during an appearance on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s mobile studio unit, at the HPE Discover EU event in November. During that segment, Patrick explained that the company’s focus was on getting OpenStack implemented into customer’s environments, rather than developing the platform itself. “It’s not for us to build code; it’s for us to bring it to market,” he said, adding that it would be SUSE’s role to focus more the development side of things.

HPE said Helion OpenStack 5.0 will be available in the summer.

(*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)