Cassatt, a start-up selling software geared to automate how a multitude of applications run on a multitude of servers, has expanded its domain a little.
The company plans to announce on Monday that its Collage software now can govern two new elements of the data centre: virtual machines running on the Xen, and XenSource hypervisors and virtual networks set up on a variety of network hardware.
Cassatt's software monitors applications and makes sure they meet required service levels. If an application isn't up to snuff, it can be moved to more powerful servers or, if it's running on a virtual machine that's sharing hardware with other partitions on a server, it can be assigned more resources.
Cassatt chief executive Bill Coleman — the former chief of BEA Systems — acknowledges it's hard to get customers to adopt a new method of managing their data centres, because individuals from different parts of the company must be brought on board. But Cassatt, which has an increasing proportion of its 100 employees in sales, is taking a methodical approach to winning customers over, he said.
The company starts by selling its software for use in a new project, then tries to advance to new versions of existing projects, eventually expanding from there, he said. "Nobody does forklift changes of entire enterprises. It's more of a migration," Coleman said.
He also expects get peer pressure on his side.
"We have about 10 customers in the pipeline, who are moving forward toward production, that are the names in a number of industries," Coleman said. "You've got to get about 5 of those publicly referenceable before everybody else goes, 'Now I get it, and I'd better look at it.' That's my goal between now and next summer."
