HPE to acquire Morpheus Data, expanding cloud experience

Last week, HPE announced its intention to acquire Morpheus Data. This move is intended to bolster the hybrid, multi-cloud experience of HPE GreenLake and to complement HPE’s OpsRamp acquisition with the addition of multi-cloud automation, orchestration and FinOps capabilities. HPE highlights that the addition of Morpheus Data will add the following:

• Application provisioning.
• Cloud cost optimization.
• Insights into spending patterns.
• Usage limits.

From an analytical perspective, this acquisition is a smart move. It aligns with HPE’s strategy to transition from infrastructure vendor to cloud service provider. According to TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group research, 68% of organizations agreed the complexity of IT infrastructure environments, both hybrid and multi-cloud, is slowing down IT operations and initiatives. Additionally, 74% of organizations agreed they are under pressure to accelerate IT infrastructure provisioning and deployment to support developers and line-of-business teams.

Underlying this complexity is the fact that every distinct environment requires its own unique expertise. Experience in one service doesn't necessarily translate to another. Organizations often struggle with skills gaps and insufficient experience among their personnel. If a business experiences attrition within one group of cloud administrators, another team can’t easily pick up the slack. As organizations want to become more diverse in their use of cloud services, the disparity in experience holds them back. Beyond the challenges related to disparate management, the added complexity of Kubernetes further slows down application modernization.

Morpheus Data offers tools to simplify and accelerate the creation of private clouds. Organizations can use advanced cloud-native services provided by multiple cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform, without the added burden of learning multiple public cloud tool sets. Morpheus Data simplifies the deployment and management of Kubernetes while integrating with major hypervisor offerings such as VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV and KVM. It also enables the use of central services. As a result, organizations can gain visibility across their environment, create self-service catalogs and automate day-two activities. These capabilities complement the infrastructure observability HPE acquired with its OpsRamp acquisition last year.

This is a promising strategy, as HPE looks to expand its HPE GreenLake cloud services beyond its competitors such as Dell Apex. HPE intends to offer services that appeal to developers, platform engineers, and infrastructure and operations teams to compete with the top public cloud service providers. I look forward to seeing how HPE will integrate both Morpheus Data and OpsRamp into HPE GreenLake, and specifically how HPE plans to prioritize heterogeneous support moving forward.

Organizations want and need a single experience to manage their entire hybrid, multi-cloud environments. But the closer vendors tie their management platform access to their underlying infrastructure services, the more likely it will be that organizations will not be familiar with the offering. Another possibility is that they will be less likely to use it to avoid being locked in with a single infrastructure service.

A key to long-term success for HPE centers on continued investment in the heterogeneous capabilities of both Morpheus Data and OpsRamp. The good news is that HPE has a history of prioritizing heterogeneous management support, such as OneView. Ultimately, while this acquisition has a lot of potential for HPE, execution will determine how much value this move provides to customers.

Scott Sinclair is Practice Director with TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, covering the storage industry.

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.