Adaptive Computing, which just got a dozen new cloud patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office, figures it’s got one of the largest private cloud patent portfolios around.

It also says it’s seeing rapid cloud growth due to its product ınnovation, up 244% last year.

Its widgetry manages some of the biggest clouds in the world.

Adaptive’s new patents, which it has yet to license to anybody, cover forward-thinking widgetry like policy-based optimization and energy consumption management that have a filing date going back to 2005.


Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geeelan speaking with Adaptive Co-Founder & President Michael Jackson at 9th Cloud Expo

With the new patent influx it’s got 27 private cloud patents altogether.

Adaptive CEO Robert Clyde remarked in a statement that “The rate of innovation to acquire such a breadth and depth of patents is remarkable. The phenomenal cloud growth we’ve seen in 2012 can be attributed to being first-to-market in many core concepts, which enables us to provide a customized differentiated private cloud solution with a higher level of efficiency and increased cost savings. Moab’s unmatched policy-based optimization allows businesses to move to the cloud cost-effectively by reducing hardware and IT maintenance costs.”

The new patents, six of which were issued and six of which were allowed, encompass policies that enable cloud optimization, including data management, energy consumption management, workload-aware power management, complete environment management, guarantees, reservations and billing. The company says the patents validate its pioneering work in intelligent workload management.

The new granted patents include:

US Patent No. 8,200,824 – Optimized multi-component co-allocation scheduling with advanced reservations for data transfers and distributed jobs.

US Patent No. 8,245,059 – System and method for managing energy consumption in a compute environment (receiving information associated with at least one of energy consumption and a temperature of nodes each data center of a group of distributed data centers to yield received information).

US Patent No. 8,271,980 – System and method of providing system jobs within a compute environment.

US Patent No. 8,271,807 – System and method for managing energy consumption in a compute environment (reduce both direct and indirect power consumption while maintaining either full cluster performance or adequate SLA based cluster performance).

US Patent No. 8,271,813 – System and method for managing energy consumption in a compute environment (receiving energy consumption information at a workload manager).

US Patent No. 8,276,008 – System and method for managing energy consumption in a compute environment (receiving, at a workload manager, energy consumption information associated with at least one of a first data center and a second data center that is geographically distanced from the first data center).

New patents allowed (which don’t have an assigned number yet) include:

Resource “shopping cart” – Enables the concept of a resource “shopping cart” allowing multi-resource reservation queries to be made after which a “transaction ID” would be returned.

Intelligent reservation of multiple resource types – Allows multiple resource types to be intelligently reserved even when they do not require resources for the duration of the reservation.

Resource access – Enables resource access not based on workload credentials, but on requested or delivered service levels to that workload.

Co-allocation of reservations – Broadens the claims of Adaptive’s US Patent No. 7,971,204 (a system and method co-allocating resources that span different compute resource types).

Review and improvement of resource allocation – Allows a system to make a resource allocation decision in space and time, then subsequently review and improve this decision as new workload and environmental information is received.

On-demand compute environment – Broadens the claims of Adaptive’s US Patent No. 7,698,430 in areas of remote cloud usage or cloudbursting.

IDC estimates that the worldwide cloud systems management software market will be worth $3.6 billion in 2016.

Mary Johnston Turner, VP of enterprise systems management software at IDC, said, “As cloud applications and workloads become more mainstream and mission-critical, customers will move beyond simple self-service provisioning to prioritize policy-based management tools that can optimize resource utilization, power consumption, workload availability and end-to- end application performance.”

Adaptive figures its recent private cloud patents, which were developed years before the technology took shape, position it to meet these requiremnts as the market continues to grow.

“This ever-increasing patent portfolio is evidence of both our foresight and our efforts to push the private cloud space forward,” CTO David Jackson, said. “With these patents, we can deliver a more extensive set of business guarantees than any other solution.”

Adaptive Computing currently has more than 130 patent applications with both US and foreign filings. It also has hundreds of total large-scale enterprise customers with thousands of servers and tens of thousands of VMs. İt’s also the largest provider of high-performace cloud widgetry. Rivals include IBM and BMC, who are recycling old management technology.

Adaptive is backed by $24 million in VC funding from Intel Capital, Tudor Growth Capital and Epic Ventures, money that started coming in in 2010 when the company realized it could grow faster with outside investment rather than bootstrapping its operations.

Moab Cloud Suite is license by the number of virtual machines used while Moab HPC Suite, which shares certain core functionalities with Moab Cloud, is priced per socket.