Red Hat Summit partner 6fusion wants to “create a way to meter consumption for IT.” As Delano Seymour, chief technical officer at 6fusion, explained the concept to theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, his company “meters IT like you would electricity.” Toward that goal, 6fusion “created a standard unit of measure for consumption,” which can be used to “bill customers based on usage.”

6fusion created a patented algorithm that combines six metrics to generate the workload allocation cube (kiloWAC for short). While the name may “create a little grin when people hear” it, Seymour explained, the unit of measurement could change the way businesses analyze their usage. Seymour expressed that 6fusion just wants to “make it simple,” and its service makes usage “visible so you can make good decisions.”

“We build software meters,” Seymour continued, adding that the standard process for a business starts with looking at fixed costs, operating costs, and boiling it down to a cost per month. After creating a baseline, the customer may decide to improve their usage rates, or more frequently the customer uses that information for improving billing.

Currently, the company supports virtualized environments, such as VMware and Xen, Seymour said. 6Fusion also works with physical hardware, Windows and Linux, although that requires agents unlike the remote metering service.

The company is adding OpenShift to its list of supported platform to meter containers. OpenStack and containers make metering 6fusion’s “utility” easier because it allow them to operate “closer to application and workload,” Seymour said. “Being able to meter a group of containers that are very transient … is kind of tough.” Therefore, 6fusion’s new meter that will incorporate OpenShift is likely to be released this year.

6fusion is “theoretically a data company,” but with rates starting at $1 per kiloWAC, Seymour hopes to see this small start-up of 15 employees become the “Bloomberg of IT” by helping businesses “mix and match the right workloads.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE