Cassatt

About Cassatt

Cassatt Corporation, founded in 2003 by Bill Coleman, emerged as a player in the data center automation software space. Coleman, a co-founder of BEA Systems, established Cassatt to address the growing complexities of managing large-scale server environments. The company's vision was to enable enterprises to manage their data centers with the efficiency of a compute utility, a precursor to modern cloud computing architecture.

The firm was headquartered in San Jose, California, and successfully attracted significant investment, raising a total of $15 million over two funding rounds, including a Series D round in March 2006. Key investors included notable firms like Warburg Pincus, New Enterprise Associates, and In-Q-Tel. Cassatt's core product was the Collage software suite, which was designed to automate the management of large collections of x86 servers running Linux or Windows. Collage aimed to break the rigid connection between software and the specific servers they ran on through virtualization, allowing for more fluid and adaptable data center operations. This enabled features like moving jobs between servers in case of failure and managing virtual machine sprawl. The pricing for its core software started at $100,000 to manage 40 servers.

Despite its early promise and having raised nearly $100 million in venture funding throughout its existence, Cassatt faced challenges in market penetration against larger, established vendors like CA, BMC, HP, and IBM. In June 2009, after facing imminent collapse, the company's key assets, intellectual property, and engineering talent were acquired by CA, Inc. (now a Broadcom company). The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Several key Cassatt personnel, including co-founder and Chief Scientist Steve Oberlin, and CTO Rob Gingell, transitioned to CA as part of the deal, which was intended to bolster CA's capabilities in cloud computing and business-driven automation.