A perspective on Q3 CMP acquisitions and market requirements

I just officially hit the 1-year mark here at Morpheus after spending a decade in storage and another managing IT systems and software as a customer. Given that timing and some recent news in the CMP space, I thought a follow-up to my original #startuplife blog might be in order.

One of the biggest changes in the past year has been some serious heating up of the cloud management landscape. We saw that last month at VMworld with an increasing focus on automation and orchestration. At that event, Morpheus was proud to take home the Best of VMworld award for Agile Operations and Automation.

Analysts like Gartner have also come out this year with robust evaluation frameworks and I’m sure a 2×2 matrix will soon follow. Gartner calls out a number of critical functions that in an ideal world would span multiple platforms both on-prem and off. Like many other technologies in the formative stage, there has been some consolidation as customers seek to reduce tool sprawl and systematically address the cloud complexity crisis while also advancing DevOps initiatives.

Flexera and RightScale
News this morning was that software asset management and cost optimization company Flexera had acquired early CMP entrant RightScale. From the press release and coverage so far it’s clear that a focus on controlling IT spend is top of mind. As a SaaS-based offering for departments that need multi-cloud optimization and as part of Flexera they’ve now got a full suite of offerings focused on cost control. Congrats to the RightScale team!

VMware and CloudHealth
Last month we saw VMware pick up cost optimization startup CloudHealth to help round out their CMP mashup which already includes vRealize Automation, vRealize Business, Wavefront, and SaaS based services including Cloud Assembly, Code Stream, Service Broker, and others. It’s a collection of numerous products for VMware customers looking to go narrow and deep with investment into a single platform and associated professional services. Congrats to the CloudHealth team!

The case for systematic, agnostic, and agile cloud management
Coming off of our biggest single month of revenue to date and on track to grow 3x this year I’m more excited than ever to have joined this space and more specifically the team at Morpheus. The two acquisitions from this past quarter are a great backdrop to articulate some of the reasons we’re seeing such growth. I thought I’d, provide a perspective across a few key areas that enterprise clients should consider when looking at this market.

1. Systematic: Cost optimization is becoming a feature of full stack orchestrators as by itself it doesn’t address the root cause. In addition to cost optimization, you’ve got to check off the rest of the core cloud management functions such as governance, automation, monitoring, scaling, etc. Without this systematic approach, you end up with a fragmented set of disconnected tools.
2. Agnostic: Point CMP products from traditional vendors such as VMware, RedHat, and Cisco are inherently grounded in those vendors technology stacks and not good for heterogeneous enterprises. Similarly, cloud-specific tools from AWS, Azure, and others are equally narrow. With most enterprises having 3 or more clouds and a mix of bare metal, VM, and containerized apps it’s become critical to put in abstractions that can hide the underlying complexity.
3. Agile: The cloud and DevOps space is changing incredibly fast. If it takes you a year or more to get your orchestration and automation in place then you’ve lost before you started. Unfortunately, that’s what many enterprises face today with plug-in and webhook architectures that require a ton of scripting and post-deployment integration. It also means your tool provider has to embrace agile methods and release new features constantly instead of just a couple of times per year.

Morpheus is in a great position headed into Q4 2018 and the added visibility of recent acquisitions is only going to fuel the fire next year. As a multi-function and multi-platform CMP with more out-of-the-box integrations than any other tool in this space we’ve automated over 225,000 application deployments spanning 20+ clouds running bare metal, virtualized, and containerized instances. We can be up and running in less than an hour and have helped some of the largest enterprises and MSPs in the world unify their tools, people, and processes.

We’d love to help you, so reach out if you’d like to hop on a call with a solution architect to discuss your multi-cloud journey and get a demo.