HPE wants to take over cloud management specialist Morpheus Data
HPE already had Morpheus Data technology in its cloud backend – now the enterprise IT giant wants to take over the entire company.
(Image: Tomas Bazant/Shutterstock.com)
- Jens Söldner
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) plans to acquire Morpheus Data, a company specializing in hybrid cloud management and automation platforms. Morpheus Data's software has been used for some time in the backend of HPE's hybrid cloud services "HPE GreenLake". Neither company disclosed the acquisition price.
Since its foundation in 2015, Morpheus Data has become particularly well known in the VMware ecosystem as an alternative to VMware's in-house cloud management platform "VMware Aria Automation" (formerly "VMware vRealize Automation"). According to the Crunchbase database, Morpheus Data has so far been able to acquire venture capital amounting to USD 30.8 million and has long been considered a candidate for a takeover in the scene. As the entire virtualization industry is looking at alternatives to the previous top dog VMware following the VMware takeover by Broadcom, the time seems right for HPE and Morpheus Data.
Vendor-independent approach
In its platform product of the same name, Morpheus Data had focused on extensive independence from individual manufacturers and, in addition to VMware's hypervisor, supported almost all competitor products such as Nutanix, KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as incorporating more than 100 integrations with other manufacturers into its platform. However, the maturity levels differ - the integration in VMware vSphere and NSX is very advanced and quite competitive with VMware's in-house product Aria Automation. Nevertheless, experience shows that both VMware's automation platform and Morpheus Data's rival product require a lot of implementation and consulting work.
According to HPE's announcement, Morpheus Data's technology will now help to further develop HPE's in-house GreenLake cloud platform. This will include functions for the manufacturer-independent and cross-cloud provision of applications and their orchestration and automation on different target platforms. In addition, the FinOps capabilities of Morpheus Data will help to enrich the HPE portfolio with functions for optimizing cloud costs. Due to the "quiet period" in the context of the planned acquisition, no one at Morpheus Data was currently available for comment. Of particular interest is also what will happen to Morpheus' recently announced own KVM-based hypervisor "MVM" after the takeover by HPE. MVM is currently available as a public beta.
(are)
