"If you just look at infrastructure you can't always understand what's happening, and know what energy each application is using," he says.

Viridity was founded in 2007 and has financing of more than $7 million from Battery Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. The company was founded by CTO Michael Rowan, who founded continuous data protection vendor Revivio, which was by Symantec three years ago; and vice president of engineering Chris Rocca, also a veteran of Revivio.Viridity is still searching for a CEO. For now, board chairman Dave Lemont is serving as interim CEO.

Viridity has eight customers so far and will make its software generally available at the end of March. The product is a software download combined with a hosted database, and prices can run anywhere from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands, depending on the size of deployment.

Before founding Viridity, Rowan says he was consulting for large companies struggling to provide power to IT equipment. One company bought millions of dollars worth of disk drives and attempted to install them when "someone said 'you can't plug them in because there's not enough power.'" That made Rowan realize how little information companies have about how power use relates to business processes.

"The first thing that was striking was all that equipment was bought, paid for, shipped and installed before someone said there was no power," he says.