Morpheus also enables non-technical users to spin them up without waiting for IT, and enables strategic and channel partners to more easily make additional integrations of their own.
Morpheus Data, which provides a hybrid cloud management and application infrastructure automation engine, has unveiled a series of measures that expand their addressable market, make it easier for non-technical users to use their product, and enable strategic and channel partners to more easily make new integrations.
Morpheus makes a cloud management platform which has a platform-agnostic approach in a market where many options like VMware vRealize and Nutanix Calm are proprietary, and which has been strongly ranked by analyst firms Gartner and Forrester.
“We started going to market about five years ago and at that time, customers had aspirations of being more agile, but there was still a ton of legacy IT baggage,” said Brad Parks, Morpheus’ CMO. “The challenge then was that there was not a clear product category that described what we do. Cloud management platforms were the closest cousin, so we hooked our cart to that wagon. Customers have matured a lot since then and now demand for self-service platforms to help developers independent of what cloud they are working with is a thing. That’s why we have had 70% growth through Q3 even in a COVID year, because the need for a centralized platform is critical.”
That need has resulted in other vendors piling into the space, which Parks said has helped Morpheus’ business.
“It’s a good validation for us,” he said. “Initially, there were a couple early movers who missed the boat because they were focused on traditional cloud ops. We bring cloud teams and developers together. That’s a key value for us. So while there are now a myriad of players, people don’t want to be single-sourced with VMware or IBM or Red Hat. We are both a leader and vendor-agnostic, and that has helped us, especially with the channel.
“The nice thing we have seen as our market has matured is customers know they have these problems, so we have a record number of RFPs,” Parks added. “In the early stages, sometimes customers don’t know they have a problem. That’s not the case here. In addition, channel partners and strategic partners like HPE often bring us into their customers.”
The channel is critical for Morpheus.
“Today, the best partners have added automation practices and competencies around companies like ServiceNow, and that’s where we fit,” Parks said. “We connect to the automation tools, to the ServiceNow tools, to the public cloud. Morpheus is the linch pin for channel partners’ strategies. We planted seeds with channel partners over the last couple years, and they are now actively driving seven-figure deals for us. That channel commitment is really starting to bear fruit.”
The new news begins with looking to expand that addressable market.
“Now, we are looking to push downmarket a little,” Parks said. “We started selling to large enterprises, as well as to MSPs, but as more people get comfortable with the hybrid cloud world, Morpheus Essentials deals with this. It lowers the entry price point, to a start point of $16,000. It’s the same stack except for a few advanced options, and gives customers the ability to deal with the same use cases – self service provisioning and management of multiple clouds. We are a great add-on to larger HCI deals. For partners who have deployed VMware or Nutanix, we are a great option to help them move much faster and help connect a lot of the tools they already have.”
Parks said that while Morpheus Enterprise is really for 1000 workloads and up, customers with 200 workloads can benefit from Morpheus Essentials.
“The enterprise need to connect to more third party technologies is really there at about 1000 workloads,” he indicated. Morpheus Essentials is focused on enabling VMware and Nutanix private clouds, and managing centralized access into the big public clouds, integrating with identity management providers like Active Directory or SAML, and then automating execution of task workflows leveraging technologies like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet.
For partners and customers working in more complex environments, Morpheus is also introducing a new plug-in framework, enabling them to easily expand the already nearly 100 hybrid cloud integrations Morpheus already supports
“One of the reasons we have been successful is how quickly we can get up and running – getting POCs in hours and fully deployed in days, while some others can take months.,” Parks said. “That’s because we include many third-party tech integrations out of the box with no scripting. But we have Alliance partners, SIs and channel partners who want to add additional integrations, and this lets these partners and customers easily build their own integrations to the platform.”
Over the next few releases, Morpheus will be adding additional developer abstractions including custom reports, backup providers, and full cloud integrations.
Finally, Morpheus has added a democratization of data initiative and security improvements, as part of its 5.2 release.
“We have for a long time appealed to developers who want self-service but want very sophisticated tune-up ability themselves,” Parks stated. “But you also have more non-technical users who don’t want to wait for IT tickets. Scientists at AstraZeneca, for example, want to spin up databases to help with research, and not wait a week or two until IT has time to get to it. For those kinds of users, 5.2 has an easy button to simplify application provisioning.”
The security improvement adds the ability to perform Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) scanning against Linux and Windows Workloads on systems under management.
“We work with a lot of third-party tools, but this integrated SCAP scanning will be important for monitoring NIST,” Parks noted.
