ABSTRACT: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has acquired Morpheus Data, a leading hybrid-cloud management platform, to enhance its GreenLake platform and expand its hybrid cloud strategy in the face of industry changes like Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. This acquisition should integrate Morpheus’ advanced cloud orchestration, provisioning, and financial optimization capabilities into HPE GreenLake. It provides a unified control plane for managing diverse IT environments, from on-premises and edge to public cloud. This acquisition particularly benefits organizations navigating multi-cloud strategies, AI-driven workloads, and cloud-native transformations. Customers can consume Morpheus as a standalone product or as part of the comprehensive GreenLake ecosystem, which now includes dedicated solutions for regulated and disconnected environments. This development could help to solidify HPE’s as a leader in hybrid cloud management and offer enterprises greater flexibility, choice, and control over their IT operations, making it a compelling alternative to VMware-centric solutions.
Overview
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) acquisition of Morpheus Data, a hybrid-cloud management platform, which closed on August 30th, is a strategic move to enhance the capabilities of its GreenLake platform and expand its hybrid cloud strategy. Given the evolving competitive landscape marked by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, this acquisition is particularly timely. By integrating Morpheus Data, HPE aims to provide a more comprehensive solution for managing hybrid IT environments, including both on-premises and cloud infrastructures, while delivering enhanced customer value.
Strategic Rationale for the Acquisition
The acquisition of Morpheus Data by HPE is a deliberate strategy to strengthen the core of the GreenLake platform by incorporating advanced hybrid-cloud management and orchestration capabilities. Morpheus Data provides a unified platform that connects various cloud environments, both private and public, and offers end-to-end orchestration, governance, and financial optimization. These capabilities align perfectly with HPE’s vision of creating a seamless hybrid cloud experience that spans on-premises, colocation, edge, and public cloud environments.
The decision to acquire Morpheus is underpinned by HPE’s desire to address the complexity of managing increasingly heterogeneous IT environments. Brad Parks, CPO of Morpheus, and Hang Tan, SVP Hybrid Cloud COO of HPE, articulated that the acquisition prevents fragmentation and siloed management across different infrastructures, including not just HPE but other vendors as well, as does OpsRamp. See the full video below. This acquisition supports HPE’s commitment to a multi-vendor, multi-cloud strategy, which is essential for organizations navigating today’s dynamic IT landscape and very different from the VMware by Broadcom strategy.
Value Proposition of Morpheus for HPE in Light of the Broadcom-VMware Deal
Morpheus Data’s strong integration capabilities with VMware, Nutanix, KVM, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Ansible, and other environments make it a valuable asset for HPE, especially in the context of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. With VMware customers facing change, Morpheus provides a flexible, unified orchestration platform that allows them to maintain their VMware investments while adopting new cloud-native and AI-driven strategies. Morpheus should act as a “universal translator” for hybrid IT enabling HPE to offer a consistent control plane that spans virtualized, containerized, and cloud-native environments, a crucial need as organizations diversify their technology stacks.
Moreover, Morpheus has been recognized as a leader in hybrid cloud orchestration, having won several awards, including “Best of VMworld” multiple times and being featured in the FinOps Forrester Wave. Integrating Morpheus into the GreenLake platform positions HPE to capitalize on this reputation and further drive growth by offering comprehensive management across varied environments.
Integration with the GreenLake Platform and Future Consumption Models
Integrating Morpheus into HPE’s GreenLake platform aligns with HPE’s strategy to offer more robust hybrid-cloud management solutions as-a-Service. This move complements the previous acquisition of OpsRamp, which focuses on IT operations management and monitoring. Assuming the integration goes as planned, Morpheus and OpsRamp broaden the GreenLake platform’s scope, providing both developer self-service and platform operations capabilities and simplifying the consumption of IT services.
Moving forward, customers will have multiple options for consuming Morpheus within the HPE ecosystem:
- Standalone Offering: Morpheus will continue to be offered as a standalone software solution, maintaining its agnostic stance that has attracted many customers looking for flexibility without vendor lock-in. This allows enterprises to use Morpheus alongside existing investments in VMware, Red Hat, Microsoft, Nutanix, SUSE, Canonical, and other environments.
- Integrated with GreenLake: It is intended that Morpheus will be deeply integrated into HPE’s GreenLake platform, enabling customers to leverage its capabilities as part of a more comprehensive, managed hybrid cloud solution. This integration could allow customers to discover, monitor, provision, and protect their hybrid cloud environments from a single pane of glass.
- Support for Regulated and Disconnected Environments: HPE GreenLake now includes a “dedicated” version for regulated and disconnected use cases, such as sovereign clouds and environments requiring full data sovereignty. Morpheus will also be available on this dedicated platform, allowing customers in highly regulated industries to leverage its provisioning and orchestration capabilities.
- Enhanced AI and Cloud-Native Workloads: Morpheus could be a key enabler for orchestrating AI workloads across distributed environments. AI workloads, which often span on-premises, cloud, and edge environments, will benefit from Morpheus’ orchestration capabilities that stitch together compute, storage, and networking seamlessly.
- Partnership Ecosystem Expansion: HPE’s extensive partner ecosystem, including VMware, Red Hat, and others, will benefit from Morpheus’ ability to integrate with dozens of third-party tools and platforms. This further solidifies GreenLake’s position as a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform supporting various technologies.
Our Perspective
Our view is that HPE’s acquisition of Morpheus Data is a well-timed, strategic move that enhances the capabilities of the GreenLake platform and as a stand-alone option, in a rapidly evolving cloud-operating model landscape. By integrating Morpheus into GreenLake, HPE is poised to offer a robust, end-to-end hybrid cloud solution that caters to IT operations and developer needs. The proof will be in the integration and how they can bring some of the features together with existing OpsRamp capabilities in a seamless way, like the Sustainability Dashboard. This acquisition has the chance to strengthen HPE’s competitive positioning against market dynamics, such as Broadcom’s VMware acquisition and Dell’s APEX, and gives customers more flexibility, choice, and control over their hybrid IT environments. The combined capabilities of Morpheus and GreenLake will enable HPE to better serve customers’ needs for agility, simplicity, and multi-cloud interoperability in the era of AI and cloud-native transformation. We see the offering of GreenLake control plane for disconnected and compartmentalized
