DCIM tools are becoming more widely used as companies try to manage energy use more closely to reduce bills in their data centers. Gartner estimated last year that 60 percent of data centers will be using some form of DCIM software by 2014, up from just 1 percent last year.

That also means DCIM is becoming a crowded market. The 451 Group has counted more than 40 DCIM vendors and expects consolidation to occur. Many of the vendors provide tools that measure the power drawn by equipment and analyze the data to help with capacity planning and where to put new hardware.

Viridity's EnergyCenter product is based on a database the company has compiled containing information about "tens of thousands" of server configurations, including how much electrical power each configuration uses at small incremental levels of utilization.

The software then monitors the utilization level of data center equipment so customers can see which systems are using too much power or are inefficient. It can also identify idle or under-utilized servers that might be candidates for consolidation.

A new release due out on July 1, EnergyCenter Version 2.0, lets companies associate the energy use with particular applications and services. A company can identify a group of servers associated with payroll, for example, to calculate the operational cost of that department.