Morpheus Data, which sells entirely through channel partners, focuses on cloud cost optimization, cloud management, and DevOps automation, and is seeing strong momentum, including an uptick in seven-figure deals.

Morpheus Data, which makes a cloud application management and orchestration platform tailored for the DevOps environment, has announced what they are terming ‘The Big Spiff’ – a $250,000 cash rebate for any partner that gets $2.5 million in revenue over the next six months. Morpheus Data – which sells entirely through channel partners – believe that they have about half a dozen partners with a good shot at attaining the spiff.

Morpheus Data originated with Bertram Labs, the IT arm of VC firm Bertram Capital, and was developed by Bertram Labs to manage the technology of the company’s portfolio.

“In most new industries, you have a founder who sees the problem and goes after VC to monetize solving it,” said Brad Parks, Morpheus Data’s VP of Business Development, who came to the company last year after over a decade at HP and then HPE storage. “It’s how IT has always worked, and is no different in this sector. Morpheus was different because the product itself was designed by practitioners, DevOps guys, to get their job done. It was designed by people who needed tools. The product has been sold for two years, but because it was used internally, it actually has five years of bake time and development. That’s why it has a surprising amount of functionality for a product that has only been sold for two years.”

Morpheus Data is focused on cloud cost optimization, cloud management, and DevOps automation.

“The main problems we see are the result of large enterprises responding to digital transformation,” Parks said. “IT ops teams responding to software developers often lack the ability to deliver what they need. Lack of visibility is commonly a problem, with teams often having no knowledge of how many instances they have. Shadow IT – where IT engages in authorized activity to get things done faster, bypassing internal IT – is another issue. Lots of companies tackle these issues individually. We provide a closed-loop solution providing ops teams with analytics tools to analyze their environment, and give them the tools to optimize their cloud costs. We also provide a rich set of policy-based governance for IT teams to control what gets provisioned – and we do it in a way that appeals to the development community “

Parks stressed that being developer-friendly means having a solution that adapts to the processes they want, not making the developers adapt to them.

“Many companies in this space are great if you change your practices to conform with their tool set,” he said. “We conform to methods and processes that IT teams want to use. We help smooth out automation projects, and span all development technologies.”

Large enterprises are an important market for Morpheus Data, but not the only one.

“it’s more the amount of new infrastructure being provisioned rather than the size of the company,” Park said. “The two often go together of course, but we also work with smaller but IT-centric companies, particularly software companies who need to build and tear down infrastructure very quickly.” He cited Privilege Account Management vendor BeyondTrust as an example.

“Channel pickup has come because we are the glue that helps partners improve their stickiness,” Parks said. “We unify tools they already deploy, not kick them out. We integrate deeply with technologies like Splunk and AppDynamics and bring them all together.”

Parks said that Morpheus Data partners fall into three buckets.

“One is traditional infrastructure-heavy channel partners who have sold infrastructure,” he said. “Another is infrastructure partners who have made a pivot to cloud and DevOps, and built new practice areas. The third would be the cloud-native consultancies. The most ideal partner tends to fall into that group in the middle, who have already pivoted to the cloud. They have established trust with these small and large enterprises over the last decade, and are trusted to help them reinvent themselves.”

The new Big Spiff” $250,000 back-end cash rebate is for Gold-tier channel partners who drive at least $2,500,000 in revenue in the next six months, and is on top of the regular compensation.

“We are in seven-figure deals, so the right partner with the right level of channel footprint should get to this quickly,” Parks said. “We have about 30 partners on the books, and a half-dozen of them really have the training to get this. It is a flat rebate, and some of our larger partners would like us to scale it higher, but that’s it for now.”

The Big Spiff comes on the heels of last month’s Morpheus Verified Professional [MVP] boot camp, part of the company’s first global sales kickoff, which had dozens of partner solutions architects from Gold-tier partners in attendance.

“We had strong requests for this,” Parks said. “It puts more structure around training and certification, to give sales and solution architects the right level of knowledge to feel comfortable. It gives them the knowledge they need to go fish.”