BEA Systems co-founder Bill Coleman launched his latest venture Tuesday with the opening Cassatt, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based open source and grid computing consultancy and software development house.
Funded by Warburg Pincus and staffed by IT industry veterans, Cassatt will advise enterprise and government clients on how best to build on the open-source movement, Linux and clustered computing environments, said Mark Forman, Cassatt’s executive vice president.
“The opportunity today that are being created by Web services…are crashing together with the whole movement towards open source and grid computing,” said Forman. “Our mission is to help organizations leverage the convergence of the two technologies, service-orientated architectures and grid computing, to more effectively and efficiently achieve the mission of their business.”
According to Forman, businesses today are moving towards open source architectures in an attempt to expose all areas of their infrastructure through the implementation of service-orientated architectures, Web services, and Linux. The goal being an IT department that can respond quickly to changing business needs and market forces. To achieve this, they will need help, said Forman, and that’s where Cassatt comes in.
“In order to really get the power that we believe organizations are going to have over their computing environments through the convergence of grid computing and Web services, you’re going to need a new set of tools,” he said.
Cassatt is developing those tools in its Minnesota and Colorado offices. The company is working on management tools for Linux-based, high-end cluster computing environments. These tools are intended to help IT managers get the most out of their open source systems.
Helping companies develop and run agile business architectures is the goal of Cassatt. Web services, Linux, cluster computing and open source are the resources it will use to achieve this goal, said Forman. This is the wave of the future and a way to solve many of the challenges faced by decision-makers and IT manager nationwide.
“The problem we see today is people trying to take grid computing and Linux clusters and scale that to mission-critical applications,” he said. “You just can’t get the reliability, the scalability, the manageability…that you would like to do mission-critical apps. We’re putting together a set of services and software that addresses some of the critical issues.”
To assist in this effort Coleman has recruited a Who’s Who of industry veterans. Cassatt’s management team consist of: