By John Flood
 joe hu/town crier Los Altos resident Bill Coleman is the CEO of Cassatt Corp., an enterprise software and services company in San Jose. |
Spend a few minutes talking with Bill Coleman, CEO of Cassatt Corp., and you’ll quickly discover that he has enough energy to light up the room. When your goal is to create a billion-dollar software company, you need a turbocharged constitution to make it happen.
Coleman, 58, a Los Altos resident for 22 years, is singularly focused on making Cassatt, an enterprise software and services company he founded in 2003, a leader in its field.
Coleman is no stranger to managing fast-growth companies. As a co-founder and CEO of BEA Systems, a software infrastructure firm, he led that company in the 1990s from zero to one billion dollars in revenue in four years. And he intends to do that again.
But there’s more to this than selling the next great technology widget. Coleman intends to make Cassatt one of the firms that ushers in the next great leap in computing. And he intends to do this by transforming the corporate information technology (IT) center into a utility.
The idea is to simplify the complex and expensive task of managing IT centers in corporations and make them as easy as plugging an appliance into a wall socket. It would make computing a kind of pay-as-you-use service like telephone or electricity use.
Cassatt’s software, called Collage, connects a group of servers. The program shifts processing power from under-utilized servers to those that are active, according to need. This allows companies to do the same work with existing hardware and software. Collage is used by the National Association of Securities Dealers, the U.S. Joint Forces Command and the U.S. Defense Contracts Management Agency.
“We’re about to see a huge tectonic shift, more dramatic than anything in the past,” Coleman was quoted as saying in a cover story in Forbes magazine Sept. 18.
The road to that tectonic shift is paved with what Coleman calls, “a new platform, creating a whole new way of doing things” - Cassatt’s software.
New platforms in the computer business are typically entirely new technologies that create new markets. The microprocessor made the PC possible. Before that, a computer was either a million-dollar mainframe or the minicomputer, both largely unavailable to the everyday consumer.
New technology platforms often lead to massive disruption, threatening the existing order. That spells big profits for the winners and potential extinction to the companies that can’t adapt. Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) could not adapt its minicomputer business to the growing popularity of PCs. DEC disappeared. New leaders emerged, such as Dell Inc., Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.
Coleman contends that the current complexities and escalating costs of the corporate data center are an untenable arrangement, and the current methods and companies that manage them are headed for extinction.
“Today a corporation is managing tens of thousands of servers. Ten or 15 years from now, it’ll be hundreds of thousands of servers,” Coleman said. Data center operators “have no clue how all this works. Costs are escalating.”
That is where Cassatt comes in.
The company’s software is designed to help corporate IT managers simplify the management of their data centers, squeeze more performance out of their networks and dramatically lower operating costs - without changing their computer infrastructure investment.
Utility computing solutions from such companies as Sun Microsystems Inc., HP, IBM and AT&T Inc. don’t go far enough, said Coleman.
“You can never solve a new problem by extending an old technology,” Coleman said, referring to traditional computer firms. “The big guys say, ‘Oh this is just an extension of something I already have. … I’ll just add some features.’ It’s the wrong design point … a blind alley.”
The concept of a computer utility has been talked about and hyped to some degree by computer companies since the 1990s. Lately though, the idea has gained renewed interest among analysts and corporations. And, according to some industry experts, this time it might have staying power.
“We think this is the third major computing revolution - after mainframes and the Internet,” analyst Frank Gillett of Forrester Research was quoted as saying in Business Week.
For a corporation, a data center as a utility has immense appeal, especially if it uses Cassatt’s Collage software, Coleman suggested.
Without changing its existing infrastructure or modifying its applications, according to Coleman, a corporation can automate the management of its complex IT center while ensuring that peak computing capacity is available at all times. And IT departments can set up charge-back or pay-as-you-go pricing for company departments. It translates to significantly lower operating costs and dramatically improved performance.
Corporate departments could schedule computer usage ahead of time depending on their needs. A sales department could request fail-safe computer services for a week when it needs to book orders without computer interruption, Coleman said.
In Coleman’s vision of the computer utility, it takes a startup to create the new platform and drive the industry to a new standard.
To achieve that, Coleman’s marketing and sales strategy is to work with corporations known for their adaptive and creative use of technology.
“We have to build recognition among leading-edge customers like FedEx, Wal-Mart, and Amazon that Cassatt is the right design point,” Coleman said, “Then you have solved the problem.”
It might take some time before the entire universe of corporate IT centers shifts to the utility computing concept. And that seems in line with Coleman’s vision as well.
“This will look like a revolution in 20 years,” Coleman said. “This is a long evolution.”
A clue to what motivates Coleman is the caliber of his heroes.
“The person who most influenced me about what I want and how to build my life was David Packard,” Coleman said, referring to the co-founder of HP. “Not that I knew him. But it was how he built his company, his philanthropy and the values he left behind.”
In 2001, Coleman, and his wife Claudia set up the Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities through the University of Colorado. Their plan was to donate $250 million over five years to spur research in science, engineering and technology to improve the quality of life and promote independent living for people with cognitive disabilities.
The decision to focus on helping people with mental disabilities was largely driven by their niece, who was born with trisomy 13, a condition somewhat like Down syndrome that affects speech, learning and motor skills.
Funding the endowment depended on the value of his BEA stock, which in 2001, was worth nearly $1 billion. But after the stock’s value plummeted in the market decline, funding the endowment became problematic.
So when he founded Cassatt in 2003, Coleman was driven by more than just the desire to make more money.
“If I could do something again (like BEA), I’d put most of it into that endowment,” Coleman said.
Today the institute has five full-time employees with 63 research projects under way.
Coleman isn’t just throwing money at a problem. His approach is similar to that of a venture capitalist where projects are supported with seed money. The most promising projects are funded again, sometimes with matching funds from different sources, with the goal of creating a company or moving toward clinical trials, Coleman explained.
“The thing I’d most like, which is not attainable right now until I get a lot more money into it, is that the institute becomes a center of excellence for the world.”
Coleman aims to develop technologies and therapies that can help people have a better quality of life and participate in society.
“Most people with mental disabilities are not vocal,” he said. “And they can’t take care of themselves and they can’t speak.
