6fusion, the company standardizing economic measurement of IT infrastructure and enabling a global marketplace for buyers and sellers, and CME Group, the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, have signed a definitive agreement to develop and market an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) spot exchange that will list financial products based upon 6fusion’s Workload Allocation Cube (WAC).
The spot exchange will feature contracts using the WAC as the standard unit of measurement and be available for trading on an electronic platform using technology licensed from CME Group. 6fusion’s UC6 software platform will be used to track fulfillment of physically delivered contracts traded on the spot exchange. The spot exchange beta is expected to launch later this year featuring a host of infrastructure buyers, sellers and partners.
The WAC is the industry’s first patented benchmark to universally measure consumption and capacity of compute, network and storage resources. The WAC makes it possible for buyers to standardize the quantification of IaaS requirements, making it simpler to determine the infrastructure type, quantities, and pricing that best match requirements across heterogeneous suppliers in the marketplace.
Comments on the news:
· John Cowan, 6fusion CEO and Co-Founder: “6fusion was founded on philosophy that on-demand IT infrastructure will not reach it’s true potential until it can be consumed like a true utility and traded on an open exchange. An open exchange is good for both buyers and suppliers of cloud infrastructure. For buyers, it unlocks unprecedented visibility and control over the enterprise cloud transformation process. For suppliers, it dramatically reduces the cost of business acquisition and drives increased transaction velocity.”
· Bryan Durkin, CME Group Chief Operating Officer: “CME Group wants to provide customers the opportunity to hedge risk in the growing cloud computing industry. CME Group’s experience with new products and technological expertise makes the company an ideal candidate to innovate in this space and we’re happy to work with 6fusion to go to market.”
· Owen Rogers, Senior Analyst, Digital Economics at 451 Research: “The combination of CME Group’s wide ranging experience in commodity exchanges together with 6fusion’s unique metering capability puts the collaboration in a strong position to deliver the economic benefits of real utility computing.”