Intel has tucked some money into Utah-based already-profitable Adaptive Computing as lead investor in a $14 million A round joined by Tudor Ventures and Epic Ventures.

The money is Adaptive's first outside backing since the company started nine years ago as Cluster Resources working in HPC. It took the funding to capitalize on current demands for cloud automation intelligence beyond its organic revenues and will use the money to hire more people to service customers.

CEO Michael Jackson figures the 70-man company will be up to 100 early next year. The additions will be largely in pre-sales and professional services.

Adaptive's Moab widgetry upgrades static self-service cloud projects to workload-driven clouds. It delivers intelligent governance that lets users consolidate and virtualize resources, allocate and manage applications, improve SLAs and reduce operational costs. In other words, both infrastructure and application automation in a cloud environment.

It will also need a bit more technology on the virtual provisioning side and is mindful that 755 of workloads aren't virtualized yet.

Adaptive claims hundreds of customers representing hundreds of thousands of cores in some of the world's largest computing installations.

Chris Stone, the former vice-chairman of Novell, is managing director of Zions Bank's Epic Ventures.