6fusion launches open Marketplace for IaaS

6fusion, the company standardizing economic measurement of IT infrastructure and enabling a global marketplace for buyers and sellers, has announced the launch of the 6fusion Marketplace, which enables users and suppliers of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to buy and sell in a standardized, yet flexible open marketplace.

The 6fusion Marketplace is based on two key technologies, the Workload Allocation Cube (WAC), the industry's first patented benchmark to universally measure consumption and capacity of compute, network and storage resources, and compute types which represent categories of commonly occurring infrastructure consumption patterns. Leveraging the WAC and compute types, the 6fusion marketplace standardizes IaaS contracting across service providers and makes it simpler to determine the infrastructure type, quantities, timeframe, and pricing that best match business and technical requirements in the marketplace. The WAC and compute types make it simple to compare and contrast prices and terms against multiple similar suppliers improving overall IT spend efficiency.

The release of the 6fusion Marketplace marks a major milestone in the way IT organizations measure, acquire and use IT infrastructure. "We started 6fusion with a vision of making it easier to consume infrastructure services," said Delano Seymour, 6fusion CTO and Cofounder. "The Marketplace is highly disruptive because it brings the principles of market economics to an industry currently dominated by one supplier," said John Cowan, 6fusion CEO and Cofounder. "6fusion is making it possible for buyers and sellers to have an apples-to-apples business conversation about supply and demand across heterogeneous infrastructure platforms and suppliers."

According to a report published by 451 Research Analyst Owen Rogers, "6fusion is moving in the right direction. Consumers are bewildered by the array of cloud providers, and don't know where to start when comparing them. The introduction of Compute Types means they can compare like-for-like in terms of computational capability, and have a simple unit of consumption that can be used to evaluate relative costs - this is effectively commodification of cloud resources."

A key feature of the marketplace is the role of broker dealers such as industry pioneer Strategic Blue. "Strategic Blue was the first to offer financial brokerage of cloud services and we believe 6fusion has the right approach to developing this market in a way that adds value for all market participants," said James Mitchell, CEO & Founder, Strategic Blue. " We are excited about the next evolution of infrastructure markets and look forward to continuing to grow this market with 6fusion."

Earlier this year, 6fusion announced it had open sourced a portion of its proprietary software code as the basis of creating open participation amongst buyers and sellers. "6fusion's Open Market Framework enables marketplace customers to integrate and participate regardless of their underlying cloud or virtualization platform and manage infrastructure spend across the entire organization," said Jay Moore, CTO of CloudFX, Asia's premier cloud strategy consulting organization.

US cloud service provider BroadCloud is building a business around 6fusion's platform. "We've seen first hand the development of this marketplace into a global source of demand for BroadCloud," said Bryan Turbow, Founder and CTO of IaaS supplier BroadCloud. "As an infrastructure supplier, an open market is a great equalizer, allowing us to compete across a broader audience and wider geography," he said.

Ryan Coombes, principal at Gyrocom UK, sees tremendous upside for 6fusion Marketplace buyers. "Gyrocom's clients rely on us to help maximize their return on IT investments," said Coombes. "6fusion has created technology to meter a client's IT infrastructure usage and use that data to find the right infrastructure supplier at market velocity rather than traditionally slow procurement processes," he added.