Morpheus 5.0: Expanding access to self-service IT and simplifying cross-cloud cost management

Morpheus Data released the next major version of its hybrid cloud management platform which expands access to self-service IT, simplifies cross-cloud cost management, and accelerates integration into enterprise environments.

Morpheus is recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) with the highest critical capability scores in three key use cases. With version 5.0, Morpheus extends that lead and sets a foundation for the convergence of cloud management, container orchestration, and infrastructure automation. Highlights of this release include:

• Persona-based ‘anything-as-a-service’ (XaaS) interface to give non-technical users simple self-service IT and expand opportunities for Morpheus partners.
• Updated cost analytics and reporting engine including invoice data, cloud savings details, and cloud migration planning to give FinOps more visibility.
• Expanded codeless integrations including new ‘bare metal as-a-service’ options and certification with the latest ServiceNow release to accelerate time to value.

According to IDC, 84% of enterprises are planning to migrate or repatriate some workloads from public cloud to on-premises private cloud, hosted private cloud, and non-cloud environments in 2020. Their research also noted that 74% of larger organizations say common cross-cloud management control planes are very important to help scale their operations.[ii]

These data points are a leading indicator of the growth that Morpheus Data has seen in 2020 despite the global economic impact of COVID-19. Morpheus has grown over 70% year-on-year in 2020 with over 100% growth in new customers and partners.

To help even more companies simplify hybrid cloud management, Morpheus is announcing a lower-cost ‘Essentials’ package of the software for midsize enterprises.

“The market for hybrid cloud management and infrastructure automation is converging rapidly,” said Brad Parks, Chief Marketing Officer at Morpheus Data. “Our vision is to simplify application orchestration with a unified platform that enables self-service IT for all types of users from edge to datacenter to public cloud.”

Enabling a single-click shopping cart for ‘anything-as-a-service’ (XaaS)

Cloud computing is defined as the ability to get on-demand and elastic access to resources via a self-service portal. With the massive growth and adoption of hybrid cloud, this self-service IT expectation has moved beyond the realm of developers. Scientists, marketing teams, and other end-user groups also want on-demand access to their application services.

With version 5.0, Morpheus has extended its award-winning platform with new interface options aimed at giving self-service IT to less technical user communities who are looking for a shopping-cart approach to application provisioning.

For the first time, a single unified platform can serve enterprise self-service IT needs across all user personas – from a streamlined ‘easy button’ to robust infrastructure-as-code blueprints and everything in between to speed application provisioning by 150x or more.

Administrators and IT Operations staff can quickly create catalog items using a powerful wizard-driven interface including customized option lists and specs that minimize or even eliminate the need for end-user input.

The new persona-based interface option fits within the existing Morpheus role-based access engine including integration into identity management providers such as Active Directory, Okta, SAML, and more. This means customers can easily extend self-service to new user communities without any custom programming required.

Providing FinOps with visibility to manage cloud costs and improve efficiency

Analytics and cost management continue to play a major role in the demand for hybrid cloud management and this has become even more important in 2020 with finance teams looking at every IT purchase for cost savings and return on investment (ROI).

These teams face challenges in navigating multiple public cloud costing tools and a lack of comparable information from on-premises private clouds.

In version 5.0, Morpheus is uniquely able to provide a single point of integration for public and private cloud utilization and cost data. The new Invoices Interface exposes a wealth of data that was previously unavailable to finance teams.

Customers can view highly granular cost data from public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure plus aggregate that same level of information from on-premises hypervisors like VMware and Nutanix.

When combined with Morpheus policy engine and role-based access controls customers can create and export invoice views for cross-charge and show back or export custom views into other tools for deeper analysis.

The Morpheus reporting engine has also been overhauled with a new interface, additional report types, and a flexible report scheduling feature to manage point-in-time or recurring reports.

New report types for costing and usage include views into AWS Reservation Coverage and Savings Plans as well as a Migration Planning report to compare overall best deployment venue. Proper utilization of these reports can help organizations reduce cloud costs by 70 percent or more[iii].

Expanded codeless integrations enable ‘bare metal as-a-service’

Enterprises are constantly on a modernization journey which means at any given time they have applications running on bare metal servers, virtualization technologies, container platforms such as Kubernetes, and leveraging cloud-native PaaS services.

One of the main struggles is to bridge these heterogeneous platforms in a consistent way and avoid vendor lock-in.

Morpheus is a 100% agnostic hybrid cloud application orchestration platform. This means it can provide organizations a strategic advantage when managing vendor relationships with hardware OEMs, hypervisor companies, and public cloud hyperscale providers.

The version 5.0 release of Morpheus adds Canonical MaaS as a supported cloud type which instantly adds dozens of new bare metal hardware providers as supported options for clouds out at the edge or in the corporate datacenter. This supports adds to what is already the industry’s largest array of private and public clouds supported within a single automation platform

In addition to bare metal cloud updates, the release also enhances functionality within existing integrations including VMware vCloud Director (vCD) and NSX-T, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Microsoft Azure, and Veeam.