The WAC—A CIO's Dream

Every Chief Information Officer (CIO) does some sort of cost allocation of IT resources, whether explicitly in a chargeback/showback model or implicitly in his or her annual budgeting process. Most often, the allocation of IT costs use arbitrary processes of business – linear per user occupancy costs, business unit size, location, or who happens to need more infrastructure when capacity runs short. These models are terribly inefficient – the lack of clear and transparent cost of IT leads to misaligned IT investment and usage. So wouldn't it be great if someone could figure out a way to accurately measure the value of IT infrastructure utilization?

Well, there is a better way thanks to 6Fusion USA, Inc, a Raleigh, NC company founded in 2008. By adopting a utility metered approach to IT with the WAC or Workload Allocation Cube, CIOs can achieve normalization of consumption metering across various resources, infrastructures, vendors, and providers. The Workload Allocation Cube is the world’s only patented metric for measuring IT infrastructure usage. The normalization of measurement provides an unparalleled "apples-to-apples" comparison of consumption – regardless of the underlying hardware or software technology stack, location, or delivery model. With the WAC, users can create transparency of costs in order to identify the correlation between consumption and cost, which leads to a more efficient investment in, and use of, IT resources.

How It Works

Using the UC6 Platform, 6fusion’s utility metering platform for IT infrastructure, organizations get a clear view of actual IT infrastructure usage. 6fusion enables you to create Billing Groups like those below for segmentation and analysis.

This includes who is using that infrastructure and how consumption patterns change over time. With the grouping and drill down capabilities, users at all levels can gain deep insight into how your scarce and expensive resources are being used. The Platform has the capability to segment infrastructure consumption by groups, combined with the overall infrastructure operating cost, enables clear reporting on usage and total spend by segment/group.

What It Means For You

• Cost awareness – Simply identifying the actual per unit costs will provide tremendous insight into your actual cost of operations, on a per infrastructure basis
• Visibility – Reporting regularly on who is using how many resources within an organization you immediately see competitive and human nature dynamics emerge to improve cost efficiencies.
• Transparency – Granular reporting and analysis for transparency and ongoing improvement by IT and end users
• Focus – Exposes high cost or high growth cost centers enabling focused research, cost management, or chargeback to manage cost
• Choice – with clear costing and simple comparisons, users gain choice, visibility, and control over their IT costs
• Information – Good choices require good information. Comprehensive IT infrastructure capacity, cost, and consumption data help drive more efficient and relevant investment decision making

For more information please visit the 6Fusion website.

Attribution: Portions of this article and two images are from the 6fusion website and used with permission.