Mesosphere has changed its name to D2iQ – which stands for “Day Two IQ” – and focus to better align with organizations dealing with – you guessed it – day two management of cloud-native platforms. That focus will lean more heavily on the Kubernetes ecosystem.

The name change to D2iQ, which is not to be confused with container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform provider DH2i, is part of the “next phase of our growing strategy,” said company CEO Mike Fey.

“As a company name, Mesosphere doesn't represent the evolution of our strategy and the services we have offered our customers for some time,” Fey wrote in a blog post. “Thus, we felt the need to expand our identity. Even as we are significantly expanding our offerings for Kubernetes and other services such as Kafka, Jupyter, and more, we are not walking away from 'Mesosphere' as a concept or a brand. In fact, it's a critical part of our future, living on as a core solution category and offering.”

Fey, who took over as CEO earlier this year, highlighted that day two challenges include resiliency, scale, agility, security, governance, and compliance. “In other words, day two is when an application moves from a development project to a strategic advantage to the business,” he added.

The company’s new focus is around what Fey labeled as “spheres” that are aligned within each of its core technology practices that include Kubernetes, Mesos, and data services.

Ksphere is its Kubernetes-focused platform that provides application orchestration. It includes the Konvoy platform that helps enterprises speed up their use of Kubernetes by providing an opinionated set of cloud-native services. It also includes the Mesosphere Kubernetes Engine (MKE) that the company launched last fall. MKE allows customers to run and manage Kubernetes in a multi-cloud environment, including on bare metal, in public or private clouds, and in virtualized environments.

Mesosphere is targeted at application scale and reliability using the company’s legacy Mesos and DC/OS platforms. This platform is most linked to Fey’s notion that it would tap into its legacy services.

Datasphere deals with building and maintaining large-scale data analytics, data science, and data-driven application environments. It uses platforms like Kafka, Spark, and Cassandra.

“Each sphere is composed of a defined set of offerings that include technologies, services, training, and support that help ensure our customers reach their goals and desired outcomes,” Fey added.

The name change also highlights the company’s growing focus on Kubernetes.

Mesosphere was one of the first vendors to release a container orchestration platform with its Marathon product that ran inside of DC/OS. The Marathon orchestrator witnessed early adoption and continues to be used by a number of larger organizations in dealing with large container deployments. D2iQ CTO Tobi Knaup previously told SDxCentral that some of the company’s customers were running several clusters with up to 30,000 nodes in each cluster.

However, the market has during the past 12 months moved decidedly toward Kubernetes as the de facto container orchestration platform. A recent survey conducted by security firm StackRox found that 86% of organizations are using Kubernetes compared with 57% just six months ago.

Knaup had stated that the move to embrace Kubernetes was driven by customer demand.

“It’s important for us to understand our target customers are usually the operations teams,” Knaup said as part of the company's initial push into the Kubernetes space. “These folks offer platforms for all the developers at a company, sometimes serving up to 10,000 developers. They use a variety of software and can’t be limited to one option. Choice is very important.”

D2iQ is one of many vendors that have also moved in this direction.

Docker Inc., for instance, was also one of the early providers of a container orchestration platform with its Swarm offering. It continues to offer Swarm, but has moved much of its focus in that space to Kubernetes.

D2iQ rival Red Hat’s recent purchase by IBM has also upped its game in the Kubernetes space. IBM last week basically made all of its legacy software portfolio available through Red Hat’s Kubernetes-heavy OpenShift platform.