Cassatt has been a victim of the slow economy and an unwillingness on the part of customers to sign big deals, said founder and CEO Bill Coleman, according to a at Forbes.com on Monday. Analysts said the company may also have been a bit ahead of its time.

Cassatt is looking for a buyer but has so far been unsuccessful, and the company is now "close to the end," Coleman told Forbes. He was out of the country and unavailable for further comment Monday but Cassatt confirmed that the report was accurate.

The company is venture-backed and has about a dozen large customers, mostly in the telecommunications, finance and government sectors. They use its products to manage server usage and reduce power consumption in large data centers.

Cassatt's demise has attracted attention for a couple of reasons. One is that Coleman is a well-known entrepreneur in Silicon Valley: Earlier in his career he cofounded middleware pioneer BEA Systems, which was later bought by Oracle. (The "B" in BEA comes from Coleman's first initial.)

The other is that Cassatt's technology is well-regarded in the field of data center management. It's an area that is likely to grow in significance as more companies try to improve the efficiency of their data centers, said Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman.