Cassatt, the company started by BEA founder Bill Coleman, is redirecting its data center widgetry into creating internal clouds comparable to Amazon or Google out of infrastructure customers already have in-house.

Coleman observed that most IT professionals aren't comfortable outsourcing the mission-critical parts of their sensitive internal applications to an external cloud provider.

"They are concerned," he said, "about availability, vendor lock-in, not having the control they need and having to rebuild these applications from scratch with proprietary tools running on provider-specific platforms."

So Cassatt's updated offerings leverage its data center expertise and technology so customers can implement cloud-style computing environments using their existing systems, inside the firewalls of their datacenters, without having to modify their current hardware or software.

The new Cassatt Active Profiling Service gathers information about servers and their configurations, server usage patterns, utilization, energy consumption, server interdependencies, and other key details.

Cassatt experts analyze the data to improve data center efficiency and operations - they find orphan or unused servers, identify candidate servers for virtualization and consolidation, suggest policies to save on energy costs, and map out the move to utility-style computing.

Then with Cassatt Active Response 5.2, the user can improve energy efficiency and application availability and enable the best use of computing resources across the diverse hardware, software, and virtualization technologies already running in a datacenter.

Cassatt now supports AIX as well as Linux, Solaris, and Windows and VMware and Citrix Xen.

It intends to support Parallels Virtuozzo Containers OS-level server virtualization solutions in Q1 and says Microsoft Hyper-V will be supported as customer demand warrants.

Networking support includes equipment from Force10 Networks as well as Cisco, Dell, Extreme Networks, Nortel Networks and F5.

It controls infrastructure with policies and can automatically provision or decommission physical and virtual servers, software and network resources to meet the application demand.

Cassatt says that means customers can break down the static silos of hardware and software that sit mostly idle in data centers, over-provisioned in anticipation of spikes in demand.

Instead, they can pool their hardware and software into a cloud of computing resources shared across applications and use only the amount of computing capacity needed at any one time.

This approach frees up previously unusable compute capacity, increases control, and can reduce traditional IT operations costs for datacenters by as much as 50%, fundamentally altering the calculations for what could or should be outsourced.

Cassatt thinks "internal cloud computing is the key to data center efficiency."