Cassatt's Active Response technology tackles two of the most pressing issues facing data centers today: how to efficiently use power and how to use virtual servers most effectively. Active Response "pools physical and virtual server resources for the most efficient utilization, and uses policy-driven controls to safely, intelligently, and systematically power servers off when not needed, and on when they are," .  

But a flagging economy and sales have apparently doomed Cassatt's bid to unseat bigger vendors such as Cisco, HP and IBM. Quoting Cassatt CEO and founder Bill Coleman and anonymous sources, Forbes reports that Cassatt has been shopping itself around to competitors such as Google and Amazon. The Forbes article states that Cassatt's software "would probably be sold in a bankruptcy to one or another major firm."

"I have talked with about a dozen companies, all the usual suspects," Coleman is quoted as saying. "There are one or two possible buyers, and a couple of flickers of interest, but pretty soon I have to think about what's best for my shareholders."

Cassatt reportedly secured about US$100 million in funding over its short life span. The company's investors are Warburg Pincus and New Enterprise Associates.

Named after impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, the start-up was featured in Network World's series five years ago. Coleman, who had previously founded BEA Systems and served as vice president of system software at Sun, offered a pitch that seems prescient today given the rise of cloud computing and technologies that bundle large amounts of commodity hardware into flexible computing pools.