Cassatt, an ambitious software start-up designed to run big computer systems is "close to the end," according to founder and Chief Executive William Coleman.

It is a notable departure, not just for the nearly $100 million Cassatt ran through in six years. Coleman is a well-known figure in Silicon Valley, having served as a senior executive in the early days of Sun Microsystems, and a co-founder of middleware company BEA systems. He recruited many well-known software engineers to Cassatt, which promised software to manage complex and scattered corporate data systems.

That should have been a good business, since it is the heart of the so-called cloud computing projects touted by the likes of Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft and VMware.  For many years, Coleman acted as something of a prophet for cheap computing via the cloud, but he also thought it would mean a sharp drop in pricing with which the big companies would not be able to compete.

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"What frustrates me is my own naivete," he says. "I thought I could give companies something radical that had a proven return on investment, and they would be willing to change all their companies' computer policies and procedures to get that. Right now it's hard to get people to get beyond proof of concept tests or a data center energy analysis."

Coleman and others have been quietly shopping Cassatt around for several months, often nearing a deal only to see it collapse.

The article states that Coleman has not changed his views on the importance of big data centers and the cloud, which Coleman says "is still the next decade of technology."

Read the entire Forbes article, here.