The modern IT landscape is starting to feel like a Rube Goldberg machine that’s been duct-taped to a rocket — complex, fast-moving and liable to explode if you sneeze in the wrong direction. Enterprises want agility, flexibility and scalability, but they’re wrestling with tangled systems, legacy workloads and unpredictable budgets. It’s no wonder that the pressure is mounting for organizations to rethink how they manage virtualization, cloud infrastructure and hybrid cloud orchestration.

That’s where Morpheus Data LLC comes in. The company has been quietly reshaping how enterprises handle orchestration, provisioning and hybrid cloud complexity, according to Brad Parks (pictured), chief product officer and go-to-market officer of Morpheus. Its recent integration into the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s universe has opened the door for new momentum. But even amid big-picture strategy, Morpheus’ roots are deeply grounded — with geek-level brilliance added into the mix.

“Thinking about Morpheus’ inspiration, I’m a nerd at heart, former engineer, maybe with low social anxieties, [and that] is how I got into this gig,” Parks told, theCUBE in an exclusive interview. “But a good superhero origin story … I still crave my comic book youth. One of the things that excited me to come to Morpheus … they were actually a digital transformation engine inside my former boss’ $4 million private equity firm.”

Parks spoke with theCUBE Research’s Savannah Peterson for “Cloud AI Journey With HPE” interview series, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed virtualization strategy, integration within HPE and the evolving demands of enterprise IT. (* Disclosure below.)

Virtualization’s new reality: Simplifying the stack without sacrificing choice

When Morpheus officially joined the HPE family following its acquisition in August 2024, the company wasn’t entering unfamiliar territory. Morpheus had already been co-engineering with HPE for years, according to Parks. That deep familiarity smoothed the transition and fueled rapid product alignment, especially around virtualization.

“VM Essentials really was the culmination of a lot of work Morpheus was previously doing, combined with a trajectory that HPE was already on,” Parks said. “The VM Essentials software package that we launched back in December really is just the entry into the Morpheus family.”

The VM Essentials offering includes a built-in kernel-based virtual machine hypervisor — dubbed HPE VME — which gives customers a starting point without locking them into a single environment. It also supports brownfield VMware environments, setting the stage for hybrid cloud conversations and modernization without a full rip-and-replace, according to Parks.

“You can almost think of it as the starting point to have a hybrid cloud conversation,” he said. “You can start with VM Essentials, but then start to get into the full Morpheus feature set.

That flexibility is a requirement as companies try to navigate an era of uncertainty, tight budgets and growing pressure to streamline hybrid cloud orchestration. VM Essentials enables organizations to meet current needs while laying the groundwork for future scaling, whether that means modernizing apps or integrating automation, Parks added.

“In doing that, you are allowing the team to meet your customers where they are today, but also preparing them for the future that they’re building toward tomorrow,” he said. “That could rapidly change, and … morph over time.”

Platform thinking, hybrid cloud orchestration and the path to AI-readiness

The challenges that define today’s IT environments aren’t just technical; they’re resource-driven. As enterprise infrastructures grow more heterogeneous and interconnected, IT teams are expected to do more with less. That imbalance is fueling a shift toward platform thinking and a renewed emphasis on automation and orchestration, according to Parks.

“The world is getting more complex, more heterogeneous, and it’s moving faster than ever before,” he said. “Yet, IT teams are not getting a corresponding increase in people, money [and] skills. The gap between aspiration and ability to execute is only going to get wider.”

Morpheus has long supported hybrid cloud orchestration across a wide spectrum of environments, including Kubernetes, bare metal and public cloud. Its role within HPE’s Private Cloud AI framework reinforces that foundation, allowing enterprises to manage workloads with greater consistency and control, including those related to AI, according to Parks

“We are providing the underlying runtime flexibility and portability for customers within things like PC AI, but also in some higher-end deployments for very large enterprises who may have thousands of graphics processing units,” Parks said. “But [they] still need orchestration, automation [and] guardrails to make sure data scientists stay in their lane, but IT doesn’t get in their way.”

That balance of enabling agility without losing governance is what most enterprises are seeking as they move deeper into hybrid cloud orchestration and AI adoption. Morpheus aims to be the connective tissue between innovation and infrastructure while still embracing an agnostic approach, Parks explained.

“Using abstraction, using automation, using agnosticism — the three As — those conversations are what we see happening in enterprise IT,” he said. “We don’t care what runtime you’re on. We want to automate everything, be agnostic and really focus back on the workload.”

Unlike acquisitions that are long on promise and short on actual integration, Morpheus and HPE are already delivering, according to Parks. Years of co-engineering laid the groundwork, and now the combined capabilities are materializing in tangible ways for enterprise customers.

“If you take what we’ve talked about, this ability to have a seamless orchestration experience across edge sites, data centers, co-location, public cloud, or any hypervisor, any runtime [and] any Kubernetes cluster — that vision that HPE has, that Morpheus has embraced since the beginning is not just a vision — that is getting very real, very fast, and you think about what Morpheus is able to do within the HPE portfolio.”

The conversation is set to continue at HPE Discover.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the “Cloud AI Journey with HPE” interview series:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Cloud AI Journey With HPE” interview series. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE