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Morpheus Leads the Shift from Cloud Management Platform to Hybrid Cloud Application Orchestration with Its 5.0 Release
The Morpheus cloud management platform (CMP) has moved beyond its original focus on DevOps automation and self-service. Morpheus now provides a management control plane to enable users to deploy workloads anywhere. Such a control plane is the way of the future for managing complex enterprise technology stacks.
Morpheus’s recent 5.0 release extends self-service IT to non-technical users via a simplified shopping-cart user interface and provides significant updates to the reporting and cost analytics engine for FinOps users.
The CMP space has grown rapidly with the rise in the consumption of public cloud services. As spending on public cloud began to rise, many organizations reached a tipping point at which executives started to really care about cost. CMPs answered this call by focusing on optimizing cost.
Although the CMP offering by Morpheus Data does offer robust cost optimization capabilities, the true focus of the platform has moved beyond that. Enterprises must tackle the root cause of cost and complexity by establishing a common governance and automation framework across hybrid clouds.
Now it’s all about giving enterprise teams the ability to run applications anywhere – on premises or in the public cloud. And no matter where the applications run, the enterprise must address security and financial demands.
The complex technology stacks of many enterprises render this feat easier said than done, as does the traditional divide between development and operations. Most organizations boast at best a “software-definable” infrastructure—they’re packed to the brim with point solutions that haven’t been tied end-to-end.
Morpheus’s model works to abstract workloads, presenting them as catalogue items independent of where they run. When provisioning a workload, users can select that workload on Morpheus. It doesn’t matter if it’s to run on bare metal, as a single virtual machine, as a multi-machine blueprint, as a cluster, or even as a cloud-native service.
Morpheus provides a unified design center to allow IT teams to stand up and manage application stacks along with all the dependencies around them in the technology ecosystem. Since every big enterprise has a hodgepodge host of tools, Morpheus’ job is to work self-leveling cement – binding all the pieces together into a unified platform.
Source: Morpheus
Our Take
In short, Morpheus aims to offer its users everything they need that relates to managing an application’s lifecycle. This doesn’t mean that Morpheus aims to provide a magic single pane of glass and replace the graphical user interface of every other tool (whether that be Zerto, Veeam, etc.).
Instead, it’s about providing a coherent platform that allows customers to bring together the tools they have for the application lifecycle. This allows them to automate for improved speed and efficiency, as well as to reduce risk and improve governance with fine-grained controls.
In providing a vendor-agnostic platform that can tie together multiple solutions, Morpheus helps its customers avoid vendor lock-in for their technology solutions. “We offer customers a vendor-management strategy as much as an automation platform,” said Brad Parks, Morpheus’s Chief Marketing Officer.
The enterprise’s multiple layers of technology systems and hodgepodge of point solutions isn’t going away any time soon. Info-Tech expects that Morpheus and other CMPs or hybrid cloud application orchestration tools will soon be “table stakes” solutions for most medium and large enterprises.