A New Start for an Old Software Hand

There’s a new kid in town.

Hailing the current high-tech environment as the heyday of commodity-based enterprise computing, former BEA chairman and CEO Bill Coleman today announced the launch of a new start-up to help enterprises implement business architectures that adapt to meet changing workplace requirements.

The company, dubbed Cassatt Corp., was funded in part by a major investment from global equity firm Warburg Pincus. Though terms of the investment were not disclosed, Coleman explained that the company will be filling what he perceives to be a void in the current marketplace for needs-based computing.

“Cassatt will help customers manage and reduce the cost and complexity of their information technology infrastructure,” he said from the fledgling firm’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. “As this wave sweeps aside traditional computing environments…we will provide the systems and services that are critical to [our customers’] business success.”

According to Coleman, as more and more companies shift to Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), Cassatt will provide the underlying platform virtualization architecture necessary to satisfy the requirements of the shift. To create a broad fabric of computing resources, the company’s virtualization process will extend beyond the server to encompass a minimum of four levels of abstraction — networking, storage, computation, and application.

Through what will become a branch called Cassatt Services, the company also has developed frameworks for identifying how organizations should approach each stage of the IT investment lifecycle, including planning, deployment, and operations. “The shift to commodity computing is creating an opportunity for the next major infrastructure software [and services] company,” said Cary Davis, managing director at Warburg Pincus.

Cary noted that Cassatt will carry out its strategy with the help of experienced leaders. Aside from Coleman, who was also head of professional services and software development at Sun Microsystems , the management team includes:

• Brian Berliner, co-founder of Channel Point
• Mark Forman, former e-government czar for the federal government
• Paul Hoffman, former head of worldwide sales at SeeBeyond and Documentum
• Dave McAllister, former executive at NEC
• Steven Oberlin, former chief architect of Cray Research’s distributed computing systems
• Karen Willem, former CFO of iVast and Brio .