This provides an alternative that will let enterprises migrate off VMware Aria, and also introduces the Morpheus Plugin Framework to let companies build their own integrations, which Morpheus will certify, and a new 7.0 version of Morpheus.
Brad Parks, Chief Product Officer at Morpheus Data
Morpheus Data, which makes a hybrid cloud management and application infrastructure automation and orchestration engine, has made several moves to address the concerns about hybrid cloud caused by continued uncertainty from Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. These include a comprehensive suite of programs and partnerships including a Risk Mitigation Services Offer delivered by Morpheus Field Engineering. It lets customers determine their hybrid cloud strategy going forward and migrate from VMware if desired. Also new is the Morpheus Plug-in Framework, which responds to requests for an increasing number of integrations as the company grows, and lets third-party vendors create integrations with Morpheus. Finally, Morpheus introduced their v7.0 software.
“VMware has been an embedded part of IT for many years,” said Brad Parks, Chief Product Officer at Morpheus Data. “It is a core part of the enterprise data centre. However, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has opened up a lot of questions from partners and from customers about VMware’s direction.
“We acknowledge VMware is going to be around for a long time,” Parks added. But customers now want to buy what is current and flexible. As a hybrid cloud, we let them prevision easily, and not commit to VMware or Nutanix or Scale or anyone else. We make their VMware better, and make it a true private cloud. It’s an effective way for the enterprise to plan what they will do over the next six to nine months of the ongoing soap opera.”
Parks said that their service offering provides enterprises with a more effective way to do what many of them are considering or already doing.
“Many have already been moving away from VMware Aria [formerly vRealize] he stated. “Aria is a cloud automation stack, but it’s curated by VMware so it’s basically a one trick pony. We get large enterprises to be able to turn Aria into a private cloud. Now we are offering a set of services to migrate off Aria and implement a private cloud on top of their hypervisors.”
These services include a Risk Mitigation Services Offer delivered by Morpheus Field Engineering, providing customers with the time and flexibility needed to evaluate how they utilize VMware moving forward. They start at just $40,000 and can be delivered in as little as 90-days. The engagement is based on experience migrating dozens of the largest enterprises in the world off legacy automation tools in favor of an agnostic approach to provisioning across VMware, other hypervisors, and public clouds.
Most of this will be a channel play.
“I had a large VMware channel partner set to participate in this release, who has won several seven figure deals with us,” Parks said. “Broadcom has been asking top partners not to do this, so they are not here. We do see this as a strong channel play, however. 95% of our business is channel, and OEMS like HPE, Dell and Lenovo. We are seeing traction in the channel helping customers navigate these issues.”
The second part of the announcement is the General Availability of the Morpheus Plugin Framework.
“When I started at Morpheus, as an engineering team we had to develop all these hooks to orchestrate hybrid cloud,” Parks said. Morpheus developed and maintained integrations with dozens of third-party technologies themselves.
“We’ve now gotten big enough so that third party vendors are coming to us and asking for integrations,” Parks added. “With the Framework, these vendors can integrate with us, and we certify their plug-ins. “This is something that is very exciting for customers.”
These new tools and services are accompanied by the release of Morpheus v7.0.
“The enhanced platform is a major release for us,” Parks said. “It provides updates to distributed cloud capabilities.
One is Morpheus Hybrid Cloud Cluster Manager improvements, which enable simple provisioning and management of Morpheus and third-party Kubernetes distributions. These include wizard driven cluster creation and role-based access controls.
Also new is Morpheus Distributed Worker updates including enhanced communication relay and execution workspaces. These allow orchestration across private data centres, public clouds, hosted environments, and near-edge locations from a single platform.
