Morpheus Data, the hybrid cloud application orchestration company, released software and program updates designed to help customers, system integrators, and alliance partners accelerate hybrid cloud management projects in 2021. 

Morpheus is recognized as a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) with the highest critical capability scores in cloud provisioning and governance.  With today's announcement, Morpheus is enabling more customers and technology partners to benefit from a unified approach to PlatformOps.  Highlights include:

• Morpheus Essentials license for smaller enterprises needing private and hybrid cloud for VMware, Nutanix, AWS, Azure, and GCP starting at just $16,000.
  

• v5.2 release adds integrated SCAP Scanning for SecOps and enhances single-click shopping cart UI to enable true anything-as-a-service (XaaS) simplicity.
  

• Plug-in Framework enables expansion to the already nearly 100 hybrid cloud integrations included to unify third-party tools with no code required.
  

According to IDC, 74% of larger organizations say common cross-cloud management control planes are very important to help scale their operations. This trend towards hybrid cloud self-service and PlatformOps, coupled with recognized technical leadership, has led Morpheus Data to double customer count and add over 1,000 community users this year.

"The need for organizations to enable agile infrastructure is driving demand for a more adaptive approach to self-service," said Brad Parks, Chief Marketing Officer at Morpheus Data.  "Morpheus is a unified, agnostic and responsive platform, born to keep up with the rapidly changing demands of internal development teams."

Lowering hybrid cloud barriers and expanding partner opportunities

To help midsize enterprises access the same leading platform used in hundreds of larger organizations, Morpheus has announced a new Essentials offering starting at just $16,000 and able to be up and running in minutes. 

Morpheus Essentials quickly creates VMware and Nutanix private clouds plus manages centralized access into public clouds like AWS, Azure, and Google.  Customers can integrate Morpheus Essentials with identity management providers like Active Directory or SAML and automate the execution of automation workflows from Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and more.  If advanced third-party integrations are needed, customers can upgrade to Morpheus Enterprise which includes codeless integration into nearly 100 providers including ServiceNow, Infoblox, F5, Veeam, Splunk, and others.

This new Essentials package provides Morpheus partners with a more transactional approach to cloud automation and includes some of the highest compensation benefits in the industry.  Nearly 100% of Morpheus deals go through indirect channel partners and global systems integrators which is why Morpheus has recently expanded distribution relationships with Ingram Micro. 

Improving security posture and streamlining automation workflows in v5.2

Self-service provisioning and hybrid-cloud governance are two sides of a coin.  The best way to avoid security breaches is to make sure internal development teams can move as fast as they need while still working within role-based access guardrails.

In version 5.2, Morpheus has added the ability to perform Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) scanning against Linux and Windows Workloads on systems under management.  This means SecOps teams can not only control security posture at the source, they can reduce risk on an ongoing basis by detecting and mitigating critical security vulnerabilities. 

Centralized platform teams are being challenged to build, manage, and operate hybrid cloud infrastructure for an increasingly wide range of users.  Developers demand API-driven access for infrastructure-as-code while non-technical users need single-click shopping carts to avoid IT bottlenecks.  With Morpheus v5.2, both user groups get what they need and more.

Morpheus has extended its ‘anything-as-a-service' interface to include Operational Workflows in addition to the application blueprints introduced in v5.0.  With Operational Workflows, a self-service catalog item could represent virtually any automation runbook.  Organizations can combine heterogeneous scripting technologies, gather user inputs, and securely store and pass variables to eliminate the wait times historically associated with IT operations.

Expanding agile platform capabilities with an extensible plug-in architecture

Many legacy cloud management platforms have relied on complex script-based integrations into common datacenter technologies which can take months to deploy and can lead to brittle frameworks that do not respond well to change.

Morpheus has led the industry in built-in native integration and rapid time to value.  It's API-driven architecture and loosely coupled service abstractions combined with ready-to-use technology integrations create an adaptable and software-defined approach to hybrid-cloud self-service. 

With this announcement, Morpheus is releasing a secure and flexible developer specification to expand its network of available integrations.  By partnering with leading technology providers and systems integrators, customers will get the best of built-in codeless integrations and an extensible framework for customization.  Initial modules available for customization include custom ITSM approvals, secure Cypher secret backends, DNS and IPAM providers, tasks, and even custom instance tabs to extend instance details.  Over the next few releases, Morpheus will be adding additional developer abstractions including custom reports, backup providers, and full cloud integrations.