"Cassatt was in the right position, they have some nice technology, just at the wrong time," he said.

Its software manages a pool of servers, monitors the work being done by each and moves workloads around to where they will run most efficiently. It takes into account service levels for each application and can power servers down while they are not being used to save electricity.

Some of those capabilities are offered in other products, such as VMware's Distributed Resource Scheduler, for example. But none has quite the capabilities offered by Cassatt, Bittman said.

Michelle Bailey, vice president for data center trends at IDC, said Cassatt's technology may have come along before customers were quite ready for it. "They have a really strong vision for the future, and I think it's probably the right vision, but they were just a bit early for the market," she said.

Cassatt has talked to "about a dozen companies, all the usual suspects," in search of a buyer, Coleman told Forbes. He didn't identify the companies, but analysts mentioned IBM and Hewlett-Packard among the vendors that might be interested.