Cluster Resources, the company behind the Moab unified intelligent automation technology that's pretty much a commonplace in the world's top supercomputers, finds its business turning increasingly commercial so it's changed its name to Adaptive Computing.

It thinks that Cluster Resources may be a bit narrow and that as Adaptive Computing it reflects the data centers and private and public cloud environments it's also involved in.

Since 2007 half its revenue has been coming from the commercial sector. At the same time it's managing 12 of the world's 20 largest computing installations and other data- and compute-intensive environments.

The rebranding, its second actually, merely signals the eight-year-old company's expanded scope of operations.

There will be two business units: one, dubbed Cluster Resources, for HPC servicing its stock-in-trade techy clients, the other, called Adaptive Computing, for the clouds and data centers whose infrastructure is beginning to look like a scaled-out modern supercomputer infrastructure, less distributed and more a shared pool of resources.

The Moab widgetry is being used to blow out the walls of the silos found in Fortune 5000 and Global 2000 companies and turn their resources into private clouds as a step towards what will likely be hybrid clouds.

Typical customers are the big B2Cs, government agencies, e-commerce sites, entertainment houses and pharma concerns, largely operations that have to deal with the vagaries of the consumer such as Yahoo.

To go along with the rechristening, the company upgraded its software for data center and cloud environments. Its Adaptive Computing Suite platform is supposed to let a wider range of organizations leverage Moab's management and automation capabilities to create dynamic intelligent IT environments.

The software delivers policy-based governance, consolidates and virtualizes resources, allocates and manages applications, optimizes service levels and reduces operational costs.

IBM has put the Adaptive Computing Suite on its price list; HP, another constant partner, is wrapping it up with some of its own software - which depends on the occasion - like the deal to supply the Defense Department with three million - count ‘em - three million seats.

Moab isn't monolithic; it's additive and cross-platform, the company says, so users can keep most of the middleware, virtualization and whatnot they've got. Generally the price runs 8% of the hardware costs.

New features include commercial data center application support and virtual machine management; the ability to adapt resources to respond to changing application and service requirements; and portal access for cloud based environments.

The company says these features extend the capabilities of the Moab environment and allow it to work as a virtual data center-level operating system whose underlying infrastructure behaves like a shared pool of resources. The system takes a unified, holistic view of the entire data center and reconfigures systems and optimizes the allocation of application services according to organizational policies and required service levels.