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Company name: Named for impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, the sole American woman who made a name for herself in late 19th century France among peers Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas. Like the painter, the software company hopes to break the mold in its endeavors.

How did the company start? Last spring, venture capitalist firm Warburg Pincus asked Bill Coleman, former CEO of BEA Systems, to help investigate a server-clustering company. Coleman thought the technology didn't on its own warrant investment, but thought topping it off with virtual LAN capabilities would make it sell. The more Coleman looked into the idea, the more he wanted to be a part of the company, which launched in September 2003 with him at the helm.

Funding: Coleman won't specify, but reportedly a first round of between $35 million and $50 million that closed last September.

CEO: Coleman, who had been BEA's founding CEO.

Product: Unnamed infrastructure software.

Painting the new data center's future
Cassatt's marketing spiel uses more than a few buzzwords - autonomic computing, service-oriented architecture and grid computing. But what really interests the software company is the eventual convergence of these technologies.

Cassatt is designing for an IT environment that will emerge over the next decade as more users adopt virtualization technologies, Coleman says. Today, users can begin to scale their IT environments with Linux clusters or blade servers. In a few years, software and hardware will mature enough that utility computing can become practical, he says. The problem is utility computing requires the metering of processing, network and storage capabilities, and the software doesn't exist to do that today, he adds.

"Imagine if we scale the number of hardware components that are operating from a couple of hundred to tens of thousands, and we take the few dozen applications being managed today and break those into tens of thousands of Web services," Coleman says. "If all this is really going to happen, then the world needs an operations system, something that takes on most of the manual operation and the real-time administration of this technology, and takes out the need for a human to be in the loop."