 Hello and welcome to this CUBE conversation with Morpheus where we will be discussing hybrid cloud platform operations and the cloud operating model. I'm Rob Streche, Managing Director with CUBE Research. Today we'll be speaking to Brad Park's Chief Product Officer for Morpheus about how organizations are shifting to a cloud operating model that is not about a place but how organizations have become more agile and automated in the manner they provision and manage applications independent of the underlying place and technology. Welcome Brad, thanks for joining us. Nice to be here Rob. It's always great to have you on. We've known each other for you've been on for a while. Been a long time. Yeah and I think again this is really interesting stuff and I think it's really great to see how Morpheus is getting about. I mean you guys started seven years ago but really what's changed over that seven years? Yeah it's been a fun ride. Obviously you and I knew each other when we were in the infrastructure world but now I've moved up stack over the last seven years and it's really been a corollary for also how customers are maturing over that time right when I first joined Morpheus. Customers were still in kind of the early days of this clouded option. I mean cloud's been around forever but there was that initial kind of lift and shift debacle where people had pain around you know cost and kind of do it the wrong way. Now they're really adopting more of that cloud operating model as you described where they're wanting to deliver agility to their developers but at the same time wrap governance and guard rails around how they're dealing with things. Is that how it looks today? I mean is that really what they're leaning in on? Yeah I think the big piece that we're saying from customers is that it's platform operations right. It's about the platform. It's not about the place. It's not about an individual app. It's about a way of doing business or doing IT that represents public cloud, private cloud, hosted cloud, edge clouds, developers, security, finance, operations. It is all really coming together in a melting pot and that is what platform operations is all about. Yeah we see that too in the data that we see and we also see it that you know platform operations, the platform engineering teams and all of that joining together like you said cross FinOps, SecOps, DevOps, ITOps really this is the new IT and you know when you start to take a look at it and kind of shifting gears a little bit how has it been with the macro trends because the market's been really crazy over the past couple of years quite mildly. Yeah we've we've been growing leaps and bounds I mean 35, 40 percent year over year and I think a lot of it is I hate to say the market kind of coming to us. I mean I'm a one trick pony. I have not changed kind of my talk track or how I engage with customers but you know four or five years ago I talked to a head of IT right. We can do a demo we'd talk about developer self-service and developer enablement they would say that's great that is absolutely where I need to get to but I'm not there yet I don't have the team I don't have the people I'm still trying to deal with my public cloud you know cost problems. Today those same IT leaders are coming back you know I'll see them at a trade show and say hey and guess what I'm now the head of platform developer self-service is you know in initiative we are investing in can we talk and so that's been a great maturity for us and for the market. Yeah it's not just about the day zero problems anymore I think it's really gone to day one and day two as well and I think again as the market has shifted I mean there's consolidation everywhere you got Broadcom acquiring VMware and how do you see that impacting the customers and organizations that you talk to on a daily basis? Yeah I think the the Broadcom acquisition of VMware has been a huge tailwind for us it's also been a big challenge for a lot of customers and I you know I love VMware right we've won best of VMware world twice for hybrid cloud orchestration obviously we have over a million VMs under management but as customers are reevaluating how they think about their application footprint and the relationship with vendors it's definitely been a big tailwind for us we have a lot of customers who are saying hey I'm still going to use VMware ESX you know vSphere NSX but I want to have some freedom of movement I may need to re-platform some apps to a different on-prem hypervisor I may want to move some apps you know up into the public cloud take advantage of cloud native services I may accelerate my shift to things like Kubernetes but I don't need four different kind of silos around how I provision and manage and govern that process and so they need a unified control plane and that's really where we come in that is what we what we provide we're a Google translate if you will for developers and product teams who are trying to provision into all those different environments. Yeah I mean it is about simplicity and I think that's a lot of where people are leaning in is that and we see that hybrid model the multi-cloud model really being the way forward in fact in the ETR data that we have it really it's balancing out over the next couple years where net new applications are not just going to the cloud first and they are really balancing between on-premise co-location you know maybe cloud adjacent and being in that cloud native way what are you seeing from organizations and are they just hiding that fact that they're going all cloud native now and pushing in on that. I don't think they are really going all cloud native to your point that that stasis almost that right mix you know we've talked about hybrid cloud for a long time and it was you know maybe five six years ago a little hand wavy but really you know you got some repatriation it's not going to be a shift left where everybody is you know going from public cloud on-prem but as you've got things like gen AI you've got more distributed edge workloads there's certainly data that's going to stay on-prem and there's a place for true cloud native that that healthy mix has somewhat reached a stasis and there's going to be a little movement but oftentimes I talked to customers and I refer to leaves trees and forests right there are leaf level conversations right my app does my thing tree conversations you know I'm the VM we're at or I'm the AWS team and then there are forest level conversations and we're seeing more and more of those forest level conversations where customers need a consistent way to provision apps govern who's provisioning into what location doing reporting and charge back around those apps those all need to happen in a consistent way independent of the underlying compute format right VMs or containers and location on-prem VMware and Nutanix Microsoft AWS Azure so that in a nutshell is where we come in we're that that leveling layer that stands between the cacophony of all the different formats and what has to be operationally relevant for customers. Love cacophonies I think actually that hits on a good point because I think to your point about VMware not going away I don't think it is either I don't think VMs are going away I think that there's such a large investment and I think it's similar to mainframe where mainframe hasn't gone away you still have people with data on mainframe but I think one of the important things that we see challenging some organizations is that the partner ecosystem the partner landscape as an ISV an independent software vendor how do you see the changing landscape within the partners that you're working with? Yeah it's been a big opportunity for for the partner community and particularly OEMs global systems integrators that's a big part of our you know how we talk to customers right we're relatively small even though we've won a bunch of awards I'm obviously very proud of Morpheus if I'm a global 2000 customer you know I'm investing with a Dell in HPE a Deloitte in Accenture those are our partners and so one of the things I think that impacted that community with the acquisition of Broadcom and VMware they they took away a lot of those OEM skews the ability for those large partners to address that market and oftentimes those were the same partners that have sold VMware technology into these large organizations and so they're now turning around saying hey I have an enterprise CIO who has a budget who is trying to look at minimizing their risk exposure because they're not sure what's going to happen saying hey can I can I replace some of these kind of standalone tree level tools like a vrealize automation or an aria automation I want to still use VMware but now we have an opportunity to sell that platform to to really lead with that forest level conversation so the business we're doing co-selling with HPE and Dell even Nutanix right we we've got a lot of that ecosystem that has surrounded VMware forever knocking on our door saying hey we customers need need something to mitigate their risk how can you help with all these trends pointing to a hybrid multicloud operating model that would seem to really fit and kind of lean towards what you guys are producing from a platform perspective how do you see the competitive look landscape and what does it look like yeah um outside of that kind of Broadcom VMware conversation the other real thing that we're seeing come up often is hey I'm a big global 2000 I could build my own platform sure I've got a bunch of smart guys I sent Bob to Ansible Camp or Joe really loves Terraform we should do this ourselves um it's a very valid conversation to have if you're global 10 and you've got a thousand developers and you've invested 20 million dollars in a platform you could probably go do that one of the things we often come into situations though I feel like homes on homes for the international audience I don't know if that tracks but it was a home and road remodel show where this guy would come in and a Canadian show it was a Canadian show he would fix these home remodels gone horribly wrong oftentimes we're talking to big companies they'll say hey we've yeah we built we built this provisioning engine a couple years ago and it'll stand up my app but man we now we're changing our cloud strategy we're changing our hypervisors we've adopted a different pattern we're moving in a different direction nobody's here to care and feed it maintain it we're sinking you know good money after bad how can you help and so I would I would say that's one of the things when we're competitively looking out there there's the do-it-yourself crowd and there are some other people that have approached this from different directions where they started as a thin ops tool and they're trying to do provisioning or they've started as a VMware tool and they're trying to go into public cloud we started middle out right we started with the application the lifecycle of that app and all the dependencies around it and that's that's really I think what has led to some of our growth this year yeah I think that makes total sense because again we're big fans of open source so it's not not like don't go and use open source I think it's more about open source has its place but what is really stopping companies from simply building it themselves and using open source using backstage and a number of other different choices going and using some of the fin ops stuff out of the fin ops committees and things of that nature yep we also love open source I mean the amount of terraform and ansible and you know other programs that we were open wrap around since our open tofu yeah yeah hashi did themselves a disservice probably maybe by changing their licensing model and they've splintered off into open tofu all of those tools are good but it's it's the right tool for the right job at the right time and oftentimes again will will come into a situation where a company has written you know a thousand ansible playbooks to do what we do with with a mouse click right and use config management to configure your box use infrastructure as code to stand up your infrastructure but there are always dependencies that surround these isolated tools and that's that's really where we come in we're a platform framework that lets you bring your tools your processes and your people to the party and kind of get what you need and and the questions I would suppose to any customers thinking about building it themselves is you know a are you in it for the long haul do you have enough development talent not just to build it but care and feed and maintain it over its life cycle for the next five years is platform building your core competency or are you a bank a healthcare company you know focus on what you what you do well and and our goal as a framework is to get people you know 80 90 percent of the way there out of the box but have that full extensibility so that they can do their own thing and they can add a plug in they can extend it in a different direction to integrate with some homegrown tool yeah I I think that to me ties really nicely into the work that we did for you recently which was we completed a value assessment for Morpheus where we interviewed customers to come up with a composite return on investment all the organizations saw significant ROI I mean it was really incredible and believe they made the right decision moving away or avoiding a DIY build your own approach to hybrid cloud platform operations entirely what was interesting in the study we did with your customers is that we found that there were several places open source was just not achieving their internal KPIs what was also very interesting was the ability for organizations to get past just DevOps part of the problem what we were talking about earlier about the day zero ops and really address day one and beyond that day two things like SecOps and FinOps what is what is it that's common with all of these customers that you're seeing as you move forward into that where you're not just about getting and provisioning the DevOps side of things but you're really in hey I need to make this run and managed over time so that it's simple I think the one of the commonalities right I mean you know I both came out of engineering before we got on TVs and you know called ourselves product people right engineers like to build things right and it's fine solving problems where hands on keyboard building things that's the easy part sometimes building that initial day zero as you mentioned like provisioning pipeline that's integrated in you know into what I need to get environments on demand but the operating right the service levels the security the financial governance those are often left to the side and so you'll get companies who will build some sort of provisioning science project right stitch together a lot of open source scripting then it has to go to enterprise scale somebody has to has to care and feed it make sure it's being patched the upstream open source project you got doesn't have a security hole that's where these things tend to fall apart and so the commonality I think with a lot of those organizations is they were in highly regulated environments where they were talking about thousands or tens of thousands of machines at scale and that takes a different level of thought than a guy in a corner building some cool toy to provision things in an automated way there's so much more to the story yeah I think that was one of the things that smacked me in the face in the report was the fact that the organizations were able to get to scale and simplify and actually be able to provision out applications in a much more efficient manner that helped them actually speed innovation and I think that was another key to it was that really getting to innovation faster now I mean you talk to customers all the time what are the questions that customers should really be asking about a hybrid multi-cloud operating model and how they go after a hybrid operations platform what should they be looking for yeah I'll steal some questions actually from one of the CIOs that I had you talk to he's been at several different companies like large healthcare large telco one of the telcos even bought a company to do what we do not just a product they bought the entire company and ended up not using it in place of Morpheus and he when he talks to other customers or have them on stage at an event he he describes it as you know a few key questions first now do you have the right people right and the quantity of people this is not something you go in lightly um are you confident that those people are around for the long haul because if you're in an environment where you may be having to cut FTEs or reallocate them on different projects you know you need a stable development team to to get this up and running one of the other questions not just people are you stable in your cloud strategy if you're a hundred percent one cloud and you're going to be in there forever that's one thing but if you might change your hypervisor you might change your public cloud things are going to change if you have any uncertainty again not something to to kind of go in too lightly the other is is just funding and resourcing and in the macroeconomic environment we're in if your funding model might change in a year 18 months two years again don't start something you're not going to finish and most companies when they really look dig deep they're not able to adequately answer those questions so having a commercial platform to then build from is a lot easier than building that platform from dirt yeah it's it's about where you want to invest and are you going to invest in building out of the platform or you're going to invest in the innovation in your applications because I think that's where a lot of people get tripped up is especially now that AI is stealing a lot of budget from all over the place uh so final word where can people go to find out more about morpheus and what should they know and where should they go look yeah so morpheus data dot com morpheus like the character in the matrix yes we have a red and blue logo where we're big matrix fans so morpheus data dot com is where you're going to learn more um you know I'd say one of the nice things about being a software company is we show better than we tell even though I like to talk get a demo get your hands on it we have a community edition but we'd love to just roll up our sleeves and get a poc deployment get on with your engineers your devs your security your finance folks get them all at the table start to explore what your problems are when all of those things come together and then see if there's a way we can help you out well I really appreciate you coming on thank you for coming on today because I think this is something that's we've been around the block with this quite often and I think this is one of those problems that uh definitely is getting to a point where hybrid and multicloud is really the norm and really coming together I've been a fun ride and I'm excited to keep going with you and thank you for watching this cute conversation with morpheus discussing hybrid cloud platform operations in the cloud operating model on the cube a leader in high tech enterprise analysis and coverage