Cassatt Corp, an enterprise software and services company led by BEA-founding CEO William T. Coleman, announced its first strategic partners and outlined a roadmap to deliver on the promise of automating IT operations for on-demand computing.

"Simply on demand is the vision that enterprises have been searching for to justify their IT investments," said Coleman. "It can only be achieved by automating IT operations without disruptive change. This is the way to dramatically improve total cost of ownership while providing greater quality of service and enabling adaptability to ever-changing business requirements. That, quite simply, is our vision."

Cassatt develops software that allows businesses to run on-demand computing environments today. Cassatt's solutions reduce IT costs and complexity, boost performance and asset utilization, and require no changes to a business' IT infrastructure or applications.

"IDC's studies have often found that IT decision-makers face two very difficult tasks: driving down overall costs and delivering measurable business value," said Dan Kusnetzky, IDC's vice president of System Software research. "Technology, such as that being offered by Cassatt, allows a group of high-volume, industry standard systems to be used and automatically managed as a single virtual environment. This approach is very likely to lower costs of operations, administration while increasing levels of utilization without also requiring the organization to rewrite or re-architect applications."

Cassatt strategic partners include, Ascential, Engenious, IBM, Informatica, and Kx Systems, who are delivering adaptive computing solutions built around Cassatt technology to enterprise customers in the engineering, financial services, government, health care and high technology industries.

"We are pleased to be able to demonstrate the value of Cassatt software on IBM hardware running in the IBM Linux Center of Excellence," said Mark Shearer, vice president of marketing and strategy for the Systems and Technology Group at IBM. "Cassatt's efforts to automate IT operations has the potential of helping companies get more performance from their IT investments."

"The financial industry represents one of the most demanding IT environments in the commercial sector," said Janet Lustgarten, CEO at Kx Systems, a leading provider of high-performance databases and time-series analysis software for investment banks. "With Cassatt, the financial industry finally has a path to an automated IT operations management approach that dynamically allocates infrastructure resources to the applications that demand them the most, when they need them most."

"Cassatt is pleased that we can launch our company with high-caliber software partners who offer sophisticated solutions to critical problems in key industries," said Coleman. "For example, Kx Systems, with its advanced database used by many of the world's top investment firms, helps us demonstrate a compelling value proposition and gives us an immediate entry in the financial services industry."

Cassatt is already working and partnering with some of the largest companies and government agencies in the world, including Cisco Systems, Lehman Brothers and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Coleman founded Cassatt in 2003 to solve the problem of managing scale in commodity computing. As enterprises move to reap the benefits of commodity hardware and software, their operations and management expenses have soared. According to IDC, in the early 1990s companies were typically spending 25 percent of their IT budget on management and administration. Today that number exceeds 70 percent. Meanwhile, the complexity of scale -- managing hundreds and even thousands of servers -- threatens the performance and the reliability of the underlying systems.

Collage, Cassatt's software product, will automate the administration of pools of shared Windows and Linux servers across an enterprise. Collage requires no modifications to a company's infrastructure or applications. Companies can protect their current IT investment and preserve future choice with no fear of vendor lock in. This new approach to IT offers several key benefits:

Cassatt's proven leadership team is comprised of senior executives from BEA, Cray Research, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and the Federal Government. The Cassatt board of directors includes computing pioneers John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox Corp and director of Xerox PARC, and John Rollwagen, former chairman and CEO of Cray Research, developers of the world's first supercomputers.