"A few of our large customers say they don't track the operating costs associated with some of their large applications," said Viridity President and CEO Arun Oberoi. "They know roughly some elements of the cost -- application development, maintenance of servers, etc -- but power and cooling costs are a big component."

The information helps determine whether the operational cost of applications are in line with their importance to the company. It can also be the basis of charge-back applications that bill departments for the energy they use.

Version 2.0 can also track power used by virtual servers by connecting to VMware's vSphere management software, Oberoi said. Viridity expects to support Microsoft's virtualization platform in another update later this year.

The new release also adds some heat-mapping capabilities, to identify hotspots and cooling needs, and can send alerts when thresholds are reached.

EnergyCenter doesn't measure energy and heat using sensors and monitoring equipment, as some other products do. But it says its calculations based on utilization rates are 98 percent accurate, and that its product is easier to set up because it's all software.