Morpheus Data, which sells entirely through channel partners, is particularly looking to expand in the MSP space.

Morpheus Data has announced multiple enhancements to their cloud application management and orchestration platform. They have deepened existing integrations with Kubernetes, Terraform, and Microsoft ARM, and enhanced cloud connectors for Oracle and Azure.

Morpheus’s management and orchestration platform is tailored for the DevOps environment, providing developer-friendly solution that give ops teams analytics tools to assess their environment, and give them the tools to optimize their cloud costs.

“We have a pretty broad set of third party integrations today, since our value is providing tools to customers across their different teams,” said Brad Parks, Morpheus Data’s VP of Business Development. “We help them orchestrate and automates the handoffs, and customers gravitate to us because we bridge the gap between the granular automated techs that developers want to use. These announcements just extend that with new hooks requested by customers.”

Parks said that Morpheus’ philosophy around tool enablement is to get buy-in from everyone by giving something to everybody.

“Everyone has to find ways to feel that they won,” he said. “We provide each of the teams with the answer to a need. Developers get native access to their tools. Operations gets an easy-to-use interface. Executive management gets single provisioning, and can contain costs.”

Parks said that the tool and cloud enhancements fall into two main feature buckets.

“The first improves the automation component of the platform, extending the built-in capabilities we have had around application-centric automation,” he stated. “We provide Morpheus’ own JSON/YAML scripting framework, and while customers can choose to use this scripting, they can now use Terraform or Microsoft ARM templates as well. This helps customers maximize the value of tools and processes that they already have in place. When they have a tool they want to use, we will help them knit that together into their workflow, and that is what we have done here.”

Kubernetes support has also been expanded.

“Kubernetes is a topic de jour,” Parks said, “We have had native Docker scheduling and management from Day 1, but sometimes customers want to use Docker Swarm or Kubernetes instead, so we added Kubernetes support last year. What we are doing now is implementing an advanced Kubernetes environment with native Kubernetes scripting.”

The second bucket is a combination of new and enhanced cloud connectors for Oracle, Azure, and T-Systems

“We already can provision to dozens of different cloud options,” Parks said. “In the public cloud, we have extended cloud support for Oracle, with support for Oracle customers running hybrid IT operations across Oracle VM and Oracle’s public cloud offering.  Morpheus allows applications to automatically scale, and for Azure, we have added a new feature in the ability to use Native Azure Scale sets in both Azure and Azure Stack.” Integration with T-Systems Open Telecom Cloud – a European play – was also added.

The final component of the announcement was the signing of a new MSP partner, Exponential-e, which provides high-speed connectivity and managed application services to over 2,800 customers in the U.K. One new MSP partner in itself isn’t a big deal, but Parks said it was significant because it reflects Morpheus’ increased priority in enlisting new MSP partners.

“We have close to a dozen decent-sized ones,” he said. “It’s a target market that we want to put some more focus on. Many mid-sized to large resellers have been shifting their own businesses from on-prem hardware to multi-cloud, and standing up their own managed service practice areas as part of this, so customers can take advantage of the public cloud. The channel opportunity is to bridge those domains, and we were made for that use case, as we are white labelable and easy to charge back.”

Parks also emphasized that Morpheus Data, which has a 100 per cent channel strategy, can help partners assist customers with their digital transformation journey.

“The majority of customers who are kicking tires in Kubernetes or who are actively deploying automation products need help,” he said. “Helping customers pivot in this direction is a great opportunity – but there’s a gap when it comes to skillsets. It’s not the same skillset as running servers and storage. We help both customers and channel partners bridge that gap by simplifying the automation of that change, and integrating with tools and technology the channel is already selling, and which customers have already deployed. We are an easy button for digital transformation.”