Video: Modernizing Hybrid Cloud Management with Morpheus Data

hey Channel insiders welcome back to channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it Channel all to help you make Better Business decisions and I'm your host Katie boso my guest today is Brad Parks Chief product and goto Market officer at Morpheus an independent software vendor that's taking the complex it out of diverse and desparate clouds for some of the biggest brand names you've definitely heard of take the red pill and find out how Morpheus is dispelling the illusion that managing multiple Cloud environments can't be done in one place welcome Brad thank you for having me I'm glad to be here it's so great to have you here so I've got to talk about Morpheus because first of all coolest name that I think I've heard in the channel so far you're redefining the hybrid cloud platform operations experience it's a mouthful we could dig in and unpack that it might take a minute that's what that's what I was going to turn to you for why don't you explain to me in your own words what is Morpheus and tell us about the problems that you set out to solve glad you like the name you we were founded by a bunch of nerds right um in the early days I had to explain red pill blue pill you know the Matrix and actually in terms of explaining what we do maybe taking a step back and explaining how we got to where we are is is maybe a good way to approach it so our company was actually started by a team of 25 of the top developers on the planet who lived inside my boss's $4 billion do private Equity Firm he goes and buys other companies right he'll buy non-te companies shoe companies manufacturing companies but he saw an opportunity to actually inject technology into these companies to make them grow faster than their comp comp itors right so he hired this team to go modernize their applications you know update them provision them faster that team needed tooling to actually get their job done so they built a set of intellectual property that ultimately became Morpheus we help development teams project teams data analysts inside large organizations get instant access to provisioning the resources that they need to do their job in terms of kind of who we sell to and kind of how that works from a channel perspective well classically it they are that organization that is responsible for answering ticket requests from developers from database analysts from other program leads we help it be more responsive to delivering those requests by enabling them to provision databases as a service web services VMS containers on demand across heterogeneous Cloud environments so on Prem as well as in the public Cloud who are your clients in the verticals that they typically serve because in my mind this could go anywhere this could go any which way we all use cloud to some extent in the business world we do I think our our bread and butter really is bringing that public Cloud environment into the on premisis uh landscape right so we make on Prem technology like VMware nanic Red Hat act just like AWS or Azure or gcp um we also take a lot of the controls that are traditionally associated with on Prem and we extend those out into the public Cloud so you kind of get all of the Best of Both Worlds so if we think about industries that have a heavy footprint of on premises workloads but are also trying to take advantage of the public Cloud that leads us organically into larger highly regulated sectors so you can think about health care Financial Services um public sector is huge right for us these are all groups where they have a high degree of Regulatory Compliance probably means they're not 100% in the public Cloud yet they want that same degree of Speed and Agility um also larger environments you know we sell into pretty much large L Enterprise you need we we say 500 or more kind of applications on Virtual machines but really we start stretching our legs you know when people have a thousand or more we have customers with you know 50,000 application machines under management um all under Morpheus so think about your Global 2000 type of customers that's really where having a a a platform for hybrid cloud and developer self-service becomes a a musthave not a nice to have you mentioned a few names in there that we're definitely going to dissect as we get further into the interview but I want to talk about AWS first and can you talk about how your partnership with them Powers Morpheus they've been a fantastic partner for us um so Morpheus as a technology platform uh we can actually install the morphia software wherever customers want it could be on Prem in their data center um on a vmw cluster or a kbm cluster we have a lot of service providers though who actually install us up in the public Cloud so we'll actually run inside you know an AWS um and then they'll use morphus to organize and accelerate provisioning into a variety of on-prem and public workloads so our relationship with AWS is a little different than a lot of kind of classic software startups where their software 100% lives in AWS we actually sometimes we do sometimes we don't but in all of the cas as we're helping it provision workloads into AWS as well as other clouds at the same time as they're provisioning into on Prem and particularly special relationship with AWS um really accelerated in 2023 over the last year because we had probably half a dozen very large you know seven figure deals where AWS was actually how we transacted with our partners Morpheus opportunities so we were able to take advantage of private offers inside the AWS marketplace where a customer could use their committed AWS spend to actually massively accelerate uh their projects I have a CIO friend on our Advisory Board who calls uh his AWS budget the junk drawer for it because he can not only put you know AWS Cloud instances into it he can also acquire thirdparty software like Morpheus and draw down his commitment level to AWS so it's become a vehicle that we've used very effectively with you know Partners like you know dub dubt uh precidio advis X and others where they are also AWS partners and we're able to help customers access Morpheus much more quickly by taking advantage of their committed spend with AWS you've mentioned VMware a couple of times and for those who have I don't know been living under a rock by this point broadcom's acquisition of VMware has really thrown the tech industry through a loop as we know so Morpheus on your website you're very bullish in in helping Tech providers service providers to be able to to navigate this space so can you talk to me about how Morpheus is helping Channel service providers and their customers navigate this really massive shift that we're seeing in the industry yeah for sure we um we have a long relationship with VMware like everybody in tech let's be honest um we love VMware we've actually won best of M world uh two times for what we do for hybrid Cloud management and orchestration probably say 70% of our customers are probably using Morpheus plus VMware in some capacity to turn VMware into a true private cloud and then also reach up and help automate how we're doing things in public clouds like AWS so that's our our typical use case would be combination of on-prem led by VMware in a lot of cases and public Cloud to your point on broadcom they certainly you know they know what they're doing hakan's made a lot of people a lot of money he is he is turning VMR into a cash cap right squeezing out you know extra costs focusing on their top couple thousand customers but it really has caused customers partners and managed service providers just to reorient their relationship with VMware and on the commercial side we see a lot of customers who are evaluating hypervisor Alternatives obviously VMware does a lot of things but at their heart they're a hypervisor company ESX and vsphere are the the bread and butter people aren't going to move off of that platform you know overnight if at all but they want to have options and that's where morphis comes in for a lot of those Enterprises if you want to use on Prem a combination of VMware Microsoft nanic you know things like kubernetes Morpheus is an abstraction so we let you automate how you provision workloads into all of those options without having to do it a completely unique way so if you're a big customer like I said re-evaluating your hypervisor choice we become very important in that because we let you have Choice um from a service provider perspective about 30% of our install base are managed service providers where they're using Morpheus to provide a multi-tenant front end to managed private clouds for their customers same story though those service providers may have been using Technologies like Vere or vcloud director and that was great has been great for a long time but their customers are in turn saying hey I don't I don't really want my cost to go up by two or 3x because I'm a not one of those top 2,000 customers that broadcom may be initially focused on what are my options so our service providers are also saying how can we provide choice to their Downstream customers let's dig into that a little bit more about morpheus's capabilities because cloud has been around for a decade uh but by this point it has reached a maturity Benchmark and that means more complexities when you've got customers coming to you or you've got partners with customer challenges coming to you what are those challenges typically by this point we're at a turning point in the cloud space so I'd like to know are their challenges shifting with those complexities and what are you often hearing when they come to you and say we need help yeah it by nature is complex and it is only getting more complex um over time um and I think as a you know as a platform vendor you know our job um is to take that complexity and do as much as we can to you know to make it simple to make it easy to consume and and that's really where you know where we're at is uh you know I joke sometimes with customers I talk to that hybrid cloud is more of an inevitability than it is a a conscious strategy for most customers right if we think about just public Cloud 10 years ago to your point there's a certain segment of of customers that are going to if I was starting a new business today I wouldn't buy a data center or a rack of equipment I would probably put you know my small business workloads 100% in AWS or azure gcp that's just how new customers are starting in that that SMB space but if you're a large Fortune 2000 highly regulated you have a lot of on Prem that might be across multiple hypervisors you have a team who's taken advantage of some of the great services that AWS has you might be doing a merger or an acquisition of another company who was 100% Allin with you know Microsoft and Azure that that mess is is just a reality is not going away Morpheus as a abstraction layer we integrate all of those heterogeneous Technologies and we give it teams a consistent way to think about provisioning workloads into those clouds putting governance and guard rails around how their internal users are taking advantage of those Technologies and then the last big pillar is how they're reporting and thinking about how their organization is using those Technologies for for chargeback for showback so that's our goal is to to kind of sit in front of that cacophony and make it easier to consume govern and and manage let's put a face to a name so to speak with an example of that can you give me an example in the real world about how Morpheus was able to help solve a challenge like that for a client yeah I mentioned highly regulated Industries Pharma is one that that that meets that curve astroica is is a large obvious a large pharmaceutical uh got even larger and more important during Co and uh they've been with us for a long time I like using them as an example because we've grown with them over the last five or six years they've been with us that long um back in 2017 right when I joined I was around when we brought them on at the time they were a 100% VMware shop they were using available Technologies which was VMware V realize automation or Arya automation it's one of the platforms that still exists we replace it often because it's it's VMware Centric like a lot of customers in the story we just talked about they were looking at using additional hypervisors on Prem and they wanted to start taking more advantage of the public Cloud one of their core challenges though and it's echoed by most large it shops when a data analyst in their case a researcher doing a genome sequencing project said hey I I need a new instance of this data datase for my research they would submit a ticket fill out a bunch of information about how big does that database need to be what are its dependencies it would go into the the front end of the sausage making machine and two weeks later they would get back what they asked for I see that pattern from Enterprise cios svps of infrastructure still day in and day out the people asking it for things have to wait if that same data analyst went to AWS they could hit a button swipe a credit card and get it back in 5 minutes a lot of the problem that we solved for astroica was shrinking that time window by automating a lot of those handoffs that have to happen on PR um so they adopted Morpheus actually got us up and running in a poc in a less than a day wow once they kicked the tires and decided this is where they wanted to go all in we had them fully ramped across eight data set in less than 80 days and today they've got I think 15 to 20,000 VMS under management and they've saved about you know 6 and a half million dollars so it's a great case study because we let them get freedom of choice for their on-prem hypervisor and shrink the time it took for it to become a true Service delivery function for the business um and now they're also using public clouds like AWS out of that same uh same platform can you talk to me about how you're investing in in your channel partner this year there are a lot of infrastructure Partners who've made you know great money selling VMware and servers and storage and that's a robust business we look for the partners who are have are evolving or growing from that to develop a true hybrid Cloud kind of pillar within their own business where they're starting to integrate and develop expertise around tools like you know like anible terraform um you know AWS VMware bringing all those tools together that's where Morpheus fits inside the Enterprise so from a partner perspective Partners who are working with those same thirdparty vendors find a lot of value in in bringing Morpheus in because we are the the central control point that lets them take vendor relationships they already have as a partner and expertise they're developing and and bring it to customers in a more cohesive way and so we invest in training we have a lot of online training we run instructor-led trainings we have certifications from from admin to administrator to engineer um we have Hands-On Labs we run hosted we do nfrs with our partners so yes definitely a very robust partner ecosystem myself as well as some of the other you know exact team came from other vendors were had very robust partner ecosystems so we've been in the partner game for a very long time and are really partner First Once Mor ifus is in place what we find is there's generally a an adex drag of addition hardware and a Forex drag in additional services that surround any Morpheus implementation so if you think about it a you know a $100,000 Morpheus license and software sale that's going to be a million dollar all-in opportunity from a partner perspective in terms of other Hardware other tooling and other services what new opportunities can Morpheus help Partners and customers unlock in 2024 yeah I think the the single biggest sales play and and what we think about is that broadc conversation just because there's customers are afraid they don't know what to do and they're actually putting budget and funding behind how do we deal with this so that'd be be the biggest couple others though that are also popping up they're they're really important one is The Edge so if we think about Cloud right A lot of times you know we'll say cloud and and we immediately go to an AWS which is great it is it meets the NIS definition of what is a cloud but cloud is you know fungible it's leer based it's shared it's on demand we bring that same definition to on Prem data centers but we can also apply that to Edge locations and then AI I mean God what podcast would be complete without somebody AI washing you so I'm I'm not going to do that I'm not going to say we're you know we're your AI best friend but if you think about what Morpheus does we we provision applications we attach data to those apps we run jobs when you're training a learning model that is actually what you're doing and so we're partnering with a lot of oems like HP Dell Lenovo these are other vendors obviously that the channel works with and one of the use cases we're actively bringing to Market is the ability to provision virtual machines connect to gpus run jobs for things like training learning models so look for more in that space well Brad if I'm a prospective partner or I want to get to know your Solutions more how can I find out more about Morpheus yeah the easiest place is the website so it's Morpheus dat.com uh from there you can navigate to our partner portal learn how to sign up to become a partner ask for more information we also have links to our community edition of the software if you've got solution Engineers who want to go play with it for free and get you there so start with Morpheus dat.com it's pretty easy to navigate if all else fails I don't mind it if you email me directly I am Brad Morpheus data.com and I can help uh hopefully route you to the right person thank to Brad for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on Channel insider.com or watch on YouTube at Channel inssider newws and Trends you can also listen to the podcast version of every episode on your preferred podcast listening platform don't forget to like subscribe and follow to never miss an episode we put out a new video and podcast every week if you'd like to be on the show email me partner po at Channel insider.com once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time

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