The future of hybrid cloud isn’t a distant ambition — it’s unfolding in real time inside Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., as HPE accelerates its integration of Morpheus Data to bring agility, automation and platform thinking to the forefront of enterprise IT.

In an exclusive breakdown of their latest conversation with Brad Parks, chief product officer and go-to-market officer of Morpheus Data, theCUBE Research’s Savannah Peterson (pictured, left) and Rob Strechay (pictured, right) unpack how this transformative union is reshaping the way businesses think about operational models in a cloud-native world. From the trenches of enterprise complexity to the blueprinting of next-gen workloads, Parks’ insights offer a clear-eyed view of what it takes to thrive in today’s dynamic IT environment. Morpheus’ deep roots in automation, orchestration and integration strengthen HPE’s capabilities, especially as part of a broader strategy that includes other key acquisitions, such as OpsRamp.

“If you start to think about the challenges in the enterprise, that’s what enterprise IT is trying to do,” Parks said, during his interview with theCUBE. “They want to be a better service provider for their business. Morpheus was born by practitioners. Now we’re selling and providing capacity to those same teams in the enterprise.”

In their exclusive analysis for the “Cloud AI Journey With HPE” interview series, Peterson and Strechay discussed the Morpheus/HPE union as it transcends today’s technology and extends into the vision for a scalable, intelligent hybrid cloud future. (* Disclosure below.)

The Morpheus story

Morpheus wasn’t born in a boardroom; it was forged in the trenches of enterprise IT. The platform emerged from a digital transformation team within a $4 billion private equity firm, where it was developed to help manage and modernize a complex landscape of applications and workloads. This practical origin gave Morpheus a unique edge — it was designed by the very people who would one day use it, according to Parks.

“Oftentimes, small companies come into a big company and they kind of just get absorbed into the Borg, and they evaporate,” he said. “One of the exciting things for me is … rather than just being tucked into the Borg, we’re now actually overlaying the entire Morpheus software stack across the HPE portfolio, and it has 5X the amount of developers to bring to bear to make that real inside HPE. Very quickly, we are becoming the standard software platform that is powering the entire HPE private cloud portfolio.”

This DNA made it particularly well-suited for HPE, which is increasingly focused on delivering operational agility and modern IT service capabilities across hybrid cloud environments. Subsequently, an impressive outcome of the HPE-Morpheus merger is how the acquired company has thrived within the larger organization. Instead of being absorbed and diluted, Morpheus has been empowered.

“HPE definitely has been focusing down this path of really optimizing hybrid infrastructure,” Strechay said. “As we like to say, cloud is not a place; it’s an operating model, and I think bringing things like OpsRamp and Morpheus together has been critical to where they’re going and where they are and how they’re going to get there in the future. Because I think that helps bring the different pieces of operationalizing down to the network layers where you can do configuration and optimization in the Morpheus layer of that full stack.”

Why the partnership works for modern enterprise IT

The synergy between HPE and Morpheus lies in shared goals and complementary strengths. HPE provides scale, reach and infrastructure muscle, while Morpheus brings agility, innovation and deep operational insight. Together, they offer enterprises a platform that’s powerful and adaptable — a crucial combination in today’s multi-cloud, AI-driven world.

“Something that I’ve been very impressed with with HPE across this series is their ability to acquire companies, optimize them and roll out their best attributes and feature sets within the organization and the platform versus isolate or dissolve that technology,” Peterson said.

One standout development since the acquisition is the launch of VM Essentials, a bundled offering combining Morpheus’ orchestration expertise with HPE’s private cloud ambitions. The software provides basic VM provisioning capabilities with a built-in KVM hypervisor while maintaining connections to brownfield VMware environments.

“I think VM Essentials and where Morpheus fits into VM Essentials is a starting point for organizations that are maybe looking at hypervisor alternatives to things like VMware,” Strechay said. “I think we start to see that they’re not going to get rid of all their VMware. I’ve talked to organizations that have five different Kubernetes stacks and container stacks, multiple different hypervisors.”

As enterprise environments grow more heterogeneous and fast-paced, the gap between aspiration and execution continues to widen. Enterprise IT teams are rarely given corresponding increases in budget or talent, making automation and orchestration necessary rather than just helpful.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’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