The cloud management platform (CMP) market has evolved with narrow feature sets giving way to providers who address heterogeneous environments and broad issues including cost optimization, secure self-service provisioning, data protection, and day-2 operations such as logging and monitoring. As this market matures, customer needs are expanding to include DevOps initiatives.
According to recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research 71 percent of enterprises are leveraging automation as part of IT modernization projects. “Declarative automation is the best way to abstract apps from infrastructure but exposes skill gaps between developers and infrastructure teams”, says Torsten Volk, managing research director at EMA.
The Morpheus unified multi-cloud orchestration platform combines simple and standardized cloud management with application-centric DevOps automation giving it a unique opportunity to bridge this gap. Today it extended its lead with several tool and cloud enhancements which expose developer-friendly features with ops-friendly interfaces.
“Traditional infrastructure-centric CMP offerings have stopped short of truly addressing DevOps needs,” said Brad Parks, VP of Business Development, Morpheus Data. “With Morpheus, everybody gets what they want – developers, operations, and executives all get to manage their cloud automation their way.”
Improving developer agility with automation enhancements
Speed of application deployment is a driving force behind automation and container technologies. Unfortunately, the maintenance of these tools falls to infrastructure teams without the skills to keep up with ever changing APIs. In fact, 43 percent of enterprises list integration with existing tools and skill sets as the number 1 requirement for adoption of containers. Morpheus helps customers meet this requirement with powerful infrastructure-as-code application blueprints which are completely infrastructure and cloud agnostic, blending the power of declarative scripting with an intuitive graphical interface (GUI) designed for everyday administrators needing a single point of control.
Kubernetes is becoming a standard for app containers and Morpheus already helps corporate IT extract the most value from that technology by enabling teams to easily deploy, monitor, and manage Kubernetes (K8s) in a compliant manner. With today’s updates, customers can now utilize native K8s scripting as part of Morpheus workflows. This announcement also extends scripting support to HashiCorp Terraform and Microsoft ARM templates. All of these new automation integrations enable customers to leverage the full power of third-party tools while consolidating analytics, reporting, governance, monitoring, and logging across all clouds in an easy to manage interface.
Giving infrastructure more flexibility for multi-cloud and hybrid IT
In addition to automation, Morpheus reduces complexity by helping customers standardize app-stack deployment across any public or private cloud both on-premises and off. This balance of standardization and flexibility is critical given that 68 percent of enterprises are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy.
The latest Morpheus software release brings more multi-cloud options including support for Oracle customers running hybrid IT operations across Oracle VM and Oracle’s public cloud offering. Morpheus also augmented it’s native scaling engine for customers who want to utilize native Microsoft Azure Scale Sets in Azure and AzureStack deployments. For customers in Europe, the company added integration with T-Systems Open Telecom Cloud which blends public-cloud flexibility with private-cloud compliance. These updates are on top of what is already the broadest set of cloud connectors in the industry.
Momentum with managed service providers and technology partners
As the digital transformation landscape continues to accelerate, organisations are recognizing the difficulty of managing an increasingly unpredictable array of cloud options and automation technologies. Getting it right can mean a significant investment in tools, education, training and skill development.
This is why many enterprises are turning to managed service providers to fast track transformation projects. In fact, according to recent research, the global market for managed IT services is growing at 11.5% CAGR and expected to exceed $250 billion by 2021.
Joining the Morpheus family of MSPs is Exponential-e, a leading provider of high-speed connectivity and managed application services for over 2,800 customers in the United Kingdom. In combination with Pivotal and Dell Technologies, Exponential-e has selected Morpheus as the core enabler for its innovative cloud services.
“To create a truly unified service experience, you need to harness the power of a multi-cloud and software-defined operating model”, says Jon Bridges, Head of Cloud for Exponential-e. “Morpheus will help us orchestrate on-premises, private and public cloud services for our customers so they become next-generation internal service providers.”
