A company that makes a cloud management system is getting a $14 million investment from Intel and others, which it will use to hire new employees. Adaptive Computing intends to use this money to add "dozens" of people to its staff, which now number around 75 employees, said Michael Jackson, COO and president of the firm.

The nine-year-old, privately held company began as Cluster Resources (before changing its name last year to Adaptive Computing), focusing on high performance computing systems, but has since adapted its Moab workload technologies to manage cloud environments.

"This is a space everybody wants to be in right now," said Glenn O'Donnell, an analyst at Forrester Research. He said a variety of firms "are all trying to bring solutions to the market that can help enterprises build their own cloud."

The promise is to enable enterprises to build their own infrastructure as a service cloud internally - something akin to an internal Amazon "EC2 type service," O'Donnell said. Where Adaptive differs is in its ability to provide application automation, as well as infrastructure automation, all in a cloud environment. "[Adaptive] is taking this whole discussion up a level," O'Donnell said.

Jackson said the company's tools work as a manager of management systems, and intended to interface with variety of provisioning management technologies, as well as connecting storage, network and virtualisation management. The system can also look into the future to link performance to service level agreement agreements, or a desire for green computing and other requirements.

Adaptive has been profitable since its founding. Its growth has been entirely from customer revenue, said Jackson. But he said the demand for its products was outstripping its ability to grow the company with "organic revenues." The investment will be used to hire people who help deliver its services, Jackson said.

Paul Burns, an analyst at Neovise, said the overall cloud management tool space is fairly immature and experiencing a lot of new firms, "but I think we're going to start to see some acquisitions." Investors in Adaptive include Intel Capital, Tudor Ventures and Epic Ventures. Intel Capital says it has invested more than $9.5 billion in over 1,000 companies in the last two decades.

Intel's reach continues to expand, most recently with the purchase of McAfee for $7.86 billion. Cloud environments tend to built in mostly x86 environments, which may explain Intel's interest in investing in a company developing of the tools market for this platform.