Interconnection specialist IIX has launched a software-as-a-service (SaaS) spinoff to connect enterprises to public clouds.

Console Inc. — which, like IIX, is based in Silicon Valley and has Al Burgio as its CEO — got announced Tuesday with scant details. The company's real coming-out party will be Sept. 9, as part of a one-day conference in San Francisco.

Even though most people hadn't heard of Console Inc. before today, the conference will be named Console Connect Live, and it's where IIX intends to reveal details about the service.

The general idea is that Console will bypass the Internet to provide a connection between an enterprise office and, say, a public cloud or a customer site. Network performance would be one reason for doing this, but it looks like Console is going to put more emphasis on security. Tuesday's press release cites stats on the sharp rise in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks — up 117 percent in 2015 compared to 2014, according to a report by Akamai.

This kind of wide-area network (WAN) connectivity is getting a lot of attention lately. Varieties of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) are being pushed by startups such as Aryaka, CloudGenix, Pertino, Silver Peak, and Velocloud. A similar concept is at the heart of the so-called Third Network, a term coined by the MEF to describe an on-demand network-as-a-service (NaaS).

IIX has been active in networking circles lately. Its employees are running CloudRouter, an open source virtual router project which the company hopes will become an industrywide effort. And David Jorm, an IIX researcher, helped formalize a security response process for the OpenDaylight Project, following last autumn's discovery that a reported vulnerability had lingered for months.