Hype Cycles and Horse Races: Orchestration for the win!

Summer is coming to a close, which means it’s horse racing season in Saratoga Springs, NY. This past week, I was lucky enough to visit the track at Saratoga for an event hosted by KeyBanc Capital Markets. Being my first time at a race, I had planned on making some small bets but nothing serious’ that was until I saw Orchestration running in the 4^th race, but more on that later. First, let’s talk about another horse race…. that’s right, it’s also hype cycle season from the analysts at Gartner.

In 2021, Morpheus Data is highlighted in 8 different Hype Cycle reports!  If you are not familiar with the model, ‘Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.’  Each report will touch on a dozen or more technology categories and their relative ‘hype’ within a broader landscape such as Automation or Infrastructure.

The classic category where Gartner places Morpheus in is ‘Cloud Management Platforms’.  We are thrilled that Gartner named Morpheus a CMP Leader for 2 years and even more excited that Morpheus was the top-ranked vendor in the CMP Critical Capabilities report.  However, we’ve never seen it as a perfect fit, and even Gartner hit pause this year on CMP analysis as they saw cloud and container management converging with other automation categories.

Looking at the hype cycle reports, you get a sense of how noisy this market is.  Here are descriptions from a few that featured hybrid cloud management as a key technology and Morpheus as a representative vendor.  Gartner subscribers can link through for the full reports.

• I&O Automation:  I&O automation is the catalyst that drives quality and agility as organizations adopt cloud computing and DevOps practices, and integrate AI capabilities. I&O leaders must leverage the technologies in this Hype Cycle to deliver faster value, improve efficiency and optimize costs.

• Agile and DevOps:  DevOps initiatives must be grounded in customer value and will leverage a range of people, processes and technologies that span the software delivery value stream. I&O leaders must pursue organizational learning, continual improvement and automation strategies to deliver the required capabilities.

• ITSM:  IT service management innovations enable IT teams to deliver services, support the business consumers and help enable the digital workplace. The Hype Cycle for ITSM provides I&O leaders with guidance on key practices and technologies.

• Infrastructure Strategies:  Innovations and enhancements are critical to I&O leaders for infrastructure consumption models, automation/intelligence and architecture. Net zero data centers must be factored in, containers and cloud delivery disrupt and provide opportunity, and software-defined innovations are mature.

I’ve picked these because we’ve noticed a pattern amongst the several hundred enterprises that we work with, all looking for self-service as part of agile infrastructure initiatives. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of enterprises will build self-service infrastructure platforms to enable rapid innovation, up from 15% today.[1] For fun, I made a custom hype cycle with a view around self-service, pulling from the actual Gartner data and placements for these categories in 2021.  It shows several ops-oriented technologies just hitting their stride alongside developer-oriented domains falling into the ‘trough of disillusionment’. 

Morpheus was born as a self-service DevOps platform and built by practitioners for their own use in messy heterogeneous environments.  As a result, it doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional category’ but that’s also why it’s the perfect fit to unify the orchestration of the people, process, tools, and technology stacks found in the modern enterprise.   The secret is bridging the gap between IT Ops, Developers, Security, and Finance teams. You should grab time with one of our unified orchestration experts for a demo and discussion about your challenges.

Speaking of Orchestration’ as the pack came around the last turn at Saratoga, I couldn’t help screaming ‘go Orchestration!’ at the top of my lungs as I watched him stretch his legs and overtake the lead for the win.

[1] How to Build Agile Infrastructure Platforms That Enable Rapid Product Innovation, Gartner Inc., Dec 2020, Manjunath Bhat, Dennis Smith