The growing demand for “cloud” computing related services is driving a lot of business at big firms such as Red Hat and IBM. But other firms are benefiting as well, including Raleigh-based 6fusion.
The venture capital-backed startup is continuing to hire people and this week announced an expanded presence in Singapore. Just last October, 6fusion opened what it calls an ‘iNode” in London to service customers.
The company provides a variety of services for metering cloud services.
Research firm IDC says cloud revenues exceeded $21.5 billion in 2010 and will reach nearly $73 billion by 2015.
Cloud-related services in Asia-Pacific, but not including Japan, are forecast to be a $6.2 billion market this year while growing to $13.5 billion by 2016, IDC adds.
To expand its Asia-Pacific business, 6fusion has struck a partnership with Singapore-based CloudFX, which will handle sales and delivery needs. 6fusion already had established a data center presence, or iNode, in Singapore, and CloudFX has another “in beta right now for testing and demo purposes,” 6fusion spokesperson Ryan Kraudel tells WRALTechWire.
The Raleigh company, with 30 employees, also could add workers in Singapore in the future.
“6fusion does not currently have any personnel on the ground in the region, but we are considering adding personnel there this year,” Kraudel said. “However, we have 6fusion personnel traveling in the region typically on a quarterly basis. Our partner handles all day-to-day sales and delivery activities in the region.”
The five-year-old firm, which is backed by Intersouth Partners in Durham, raised some $4 million last year and is not currently seeking more funding, Kraudel added. However, the company is hiring, “primarily in our technical operations and development teams,” Kraudel noted.
6fusion continues to benefit for cloud service demands with customers seeking cost savings as well as “operational flexibility and business agility” which “are quickly overtaking pure cost savings as priorities in moving to the cloud,” Kraudel explained.
The secret sauce for 6fusion’s cloud play is a patent-pending algorithm that is part of its “Workload Allocation Cube” product. It touts the “WAC” as the “industry’s first commercial standard metric to quantify supply and demand for compute resources across heterogeneous physical, virtual and cloud environments.”
“6fusion’s vision is to enable an open marketplace for buyers and sellers of on-demand IT infrastructure and this vision is global,” said 6fusion Chief Executive Officer John Cowan in announcing the Singapore deal. “CloudFX shares this vision for the future of IT delivery and they will serve as a very important partner in the enablement and delivery of services in Asia Pacific.”
Financial terms were not disclosed.
“6fusion offers a truly unique technology system to not just establish how customers can measure and compare the cost of IT service delivery in a physical, private or public cloud setting, but how customers can take action by engaging an open public marketplace,” said Damian Crotty, CEO of CloudFX. “We see how 6fusion’s technology will change the game in our industry and we look forward to helping both customers and partners achieve great results in the Asia Pacific market.”
While based in Singapore, CloudFX has customers from Australia to Japan, including some Fortune 500 clients.
