6fusion is small, seemingly visionary start-up company of odd geographic provenance that have a concept, technology, and a business model that deserve attention.  It all pivots around the idea of making cloud computing resources as easy to provision, bill, use, pay for, and even resell, as it is for electrical power.  These capabilities are made possible by 6fusion instrumentation and control software instantiated in private and public cloud infrastructure.  6fusion makes a point of not selling directly to end-user customers, but rather through an ecosystem of SaaS and IaaS providers and enablers.

According to the company's web site, it was "incubated by the founder's Bermuda-based IT Service practice from 2004 to 2008" and it has a physical mailing address in a warren of small consumer businesses in Wilmington, Delaware.  According to Crunchbase, they were funded in August for $3M by a VC in Durham, North Carolina.  And, according to Linked In, 6fusion's CEO, CTO, COO, and Product VP are based in Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and Ottawa, Canada, respectively.  Finally, according to the map on the 6fusion web site their software is currently operating in cloud data centers of unknown sizes in Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and one each on the East and West US Coasts.  That's all very virtual and doesn't, on its face, add up to much but that they are new, small, and modern.  But, it also says that they are not a Silicon V/Alley company built with V/Alley money and people.  Instead, they have been living way out on the big fiber where it comes up out of the ocean, and there have been in the business of hooking computers up to those fat cables for some years.  They would appear to have a perspective that is global and networking-intrinsic.

Today the company announced the latest version of its UC6 platform, which is used by cloud service providers and ISaaSVs and their customers to meter, manage and monetize public and private cloud infrastructure.

6fusion has created an algorithm to produce a single metering/billing value, conceptually similar to the "kilowatt hour" commonly used in electrical service billing.  It is what they call the Workload Allocation Cube (WAC) and it produces a simple consumption unit value calculated from the customer's usage of six common cloud computing resources: CPU, Memory, Storage, and I/O for LAN, WAN, and Disk.

In addition to creating a simple, rational basis for public cloud billing and and private cloud charge-backs, the WAC also enables cost profiling and provides an exchange value that can be used to create a market for cloud resources based on supply and demand.

UC6 also provides a universal management console that "creates a single pane of glass through which enterprise customers, service providers and data center operators can provision and manage compute resources on a global basis" explained Rob Bissett, 6fusion's VP of Product Management.  Through the interface, users can define and deploy new workloads to 6fusion-instrumented private or public cloud infrastuctures anywhere in the world.

The new kit also features a profiling module that makes it easy to see what it will cost to mount and manage a new cloud application.  "Profiler is a critical tool for our business because it unlocks valuable insight into the cost performance of an application, the number one barrier to cloud-based adoption," said Greg Onoprijenko, Managing Director of Sales for e-ternity Business Continuity Consultants. "Our customers depend on Profiler to help determine and prioritize their cloud migration strategies."

UC6 3.0 can be used by service providers to create public multi-tenant IaaS services, by IT managers running private clouds within an Enterprise data center or in concert between the two for a hybrid cloud. "We believe the future of the IaaS business rests with the capability to seamlessly bridge the business requirements of Enterprise customers with the technical capabilities of service providers," said 6fusion CEO John Cowan.

Judging by their SLA, 6fusion seems willing to put their financial skin in the game, agreeing to take a financial hit in the form of an "aggressive credit schedule" for, among other things, network and computing outages occurring anywhere in the network.

There is a pretty thorough FAQ on their site covering more aspects of this unusual young company.  Cloud service providers, especially should check it out.