How Morpheus is Transforming the Hybrid Cloud Model with Brad Parks, HPE
Summary
Brad Parks from HPE explains the origin and purpose of the Morpheus platform. Born from the need to make IT easier to consume, Morpheus abstracts underlying infrastructure (whether on-premises VMware, KVM, Kubernetes, or public clouds) to provide a unified self-service portal and API. This allows end-users like developers or data scientists to provision resources on-demand without caring where they run, bringing a true cloud operating model to any environment.
The conversation details HPE’s acquisition of Morpheus about a year ago, following nearly a decade of co-engineering. Brad describes how Morpheus, now part of HPE’s CloudOps software suite alongside OpsRamp and Zerto, is being integrated into products like HPE Private Cloud Business Edition. The acquisition strategy focused on rapid integration to transform HPE into a software-led hybrid infrastructure company, rather than keeping the asset in a “bubble.”
Brad outlines key use cases in highly regulated industries like healthcare (AstraZeneca), telecommunications (T-Mobile), federal government, and higher education (University of Utah). These organizations have data gravity requiring on-premises workloads but demand the agility of public cloud. Morpheus enables this by orchestrating not just provisioning, but also integrations with IP management, ITSM, networking, and backup systems.
The discussion covers industry trends like eliminating vendor lock-in, especially relevant with changes in VMware licensing. HPE’s investment in its own KVM-based hypervisor and CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution (Morpheus VM Essentials) provides customers with an alternative runtime, further decoupling workloads from underlying infrastructure. The goal is to focus on the application, which delivers business value, not the runtime.
Finally, Brad shares leadership advice centered on being curious (inspired by Ted Lasso) and having the courage to voice informed opinions. He reflects on the value of startup experience, where decisions directly impact payroll, fostering urgency and accountability. The episode concludes with the vision of Morpheus helping IT “get out of its own way” to move faster and support emerging demands like AI.
Recommendations
Companies-Organizations
- Futurum Group — An analyst firm involved in organizing the Tech Field Day event where Brad presented HPE’s CloudOps suite.
- Tech Field Day / Cloud Field Day — An event series praised by Brad for allowing unfiltered, technical conversations between vendors, practitioners, and analysts. Recordings are available on their channel.
- T-Mobile — Cited as a customer example where Morpheus is used for hybrid cloud software development.
- AstraZeneca — Referenced as a long-time customer in the pharmaceutical industry, using Morpheus for workloads like genome sequencing and analytics databases.
- University of Utah — Used as an example of a higher education institution using Morpheus to provide centralized infrastructure with self-service capabilities for autonomous colleges.
Concepts
- Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Platform Consumption Services — Discussed as an analyst report where HPE was positioned in the top right, reflecting the strength of HPE GreenLake and the CloudOps software suite.
- NIST Definition of Cloud — Brad references the NIST definition (elastic resources, metered, network access, shared, self-service) to argue that cloud is an operating model, not a place.
Media
- Ted Lasso (TV Show) — Brad references the show, specifically the dartboard scene, as the source for the leadership advice to ‘be curious.‘
People
- Stephen Foskett — Mentioned as the organizer of Tech Field Day events, which Brad praises as an unfiltered forum for technologists.
- Keith (CTO Advisor) — Referenced as part of the analyst community that Brad knows well, along with the Futurum Group and Evaluator Group.
- Martez Reed — Highlighted as one of Brad’s best hires, who he first met as a delegate at a Cloud Field Day event.
- Daniel Newman — Mentioned in relation to the Futurum Group, which was involved in the Tech Field Day event discussed.
Topic Timeline
- 00:00:00 — Introduction to Brad Parks and the Morpheus platform — Joel Beasley introduces the episode with guest Brad Parks from HPE. Brad gives a high-level overview of Morpheus, describing it as a platform born to make IT easier to consume. He explains how it abstracts different technologies (VMware, KVM, Kubernetes, public clouds) to provide a unified self-service portal, bringing the cloud experience on-premises and enabling hybrid cloud.
- 00:04:40 — HPE’s acquisition and integration of Morpheus — Brad discusses HPE’s acquisition of Morpheus about a year ago, following eight years of partnership. He contrasts this with acquisitions that get “bubble-wrapped,” noting HPE rapidly integrated Morpheus to transform its offerings. Examples include embedding Morpheus into HPE Private Cloud Business Edition and creating new products like Morpheus VM Essentials.
- 00:06:29 — HPE’s business structure and cross-functional goals — Brad explains how HPE’s large organization works, with business units for networking, compute, storage, and software. He describes cross-functional teams that thread intellectual property across units to present cohesive solutions to customers. The goal is to help customers achieve a cloud operating model and leverage innovations like AI, rather than assembling infrastructure piecemeal.
- 00:08:22 — Clarification on HP Inc. vs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise — Joel asks for clarification on the relationship between HP and HPE. Brad explains the split that occurred about 10-11 years ago, where HP Inc. took personal systems (PCs, printers) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise took business systems (compute, storage, networking, software, and services). They are separate companies but share core DNA.
- 00:09:52 — Discussion of Cloud Field Day and the CloudOps suite — Brad talks about presenting at a Tech Field Day event, breaking down the HPE CloudOps software suite (Morpheus, OpsRamp, Zerto). He describes the event as an unfiltered forum for technologists to discuss products and get real-time feedback from practitioners and analysts. The presentation covered the software stack, private cloud systems, and HPE’s own KVM and Kubernetes runtimes.
- 00:14:44 — The business case for Morpheus: Effectiveness and efficiency — Brad addresses how practitioners justify Morpheus to senior leadership. He frames it around helping IT be more effective (deploying applications quickly) and more efficient (reducing costs and manual effort). He recounts Morpheus’s origin as an internal tool built by application developers who needed to be both effective and cost-conscious within a large private company.
- 00:16:12 — Customer use cases: T-Mobile, AstraZeneca, and regulated industries — Brad details customer examples, highlighting success in regulated industries with data gravity. T-Mobile uses it for hybrid software development. AstraZeneca uses it for genome sequencing and analytics databases. The common theme is enabling a cloud-native operating model while keeping sensitive workloads and data on-premises, helping IT “get out of its own way.”
- 00:19:02 — Higher education use case: University of Utah — Brad discusses the University of Utah as an example of a service provider model. Central IT needs to provide shared infrastructure with guardrails, while autonomous colleges (like Engineering or Business) need self-service capabilities. Morpheus provides the multi-tenancy and role-based access control to enable this “central hub and spoke fiefdom” model common in higher ed.
- 00:21:38 — Morpheus as an abstraction layer and ‘Google Translate for IT’ — Joel tries to conceptualize Morpheus as a unified interface with a dropdown for deployment location. Brad agrees, calling it an abstraction model. He elaborates that Morpheus orchestrates not just provisioning, but all the surrounding handoffs: IP address management, DNS, load balancer configuration, backups, and monitoring, agnostic of the underlying technology.
- 00:23:31 — The next challenge: Eliminating vendor lock-in — Brad identifies eliminating lock-in to specific hypervisors, Kubernetes flavors, or public clouds as a major focus. He notes hybrid cloud is often an inevitability due to M&A or team preferences. HPE’s investment in its own KVM and Kubernetes runtimes (Morpheus VM Essentials) gives customers an alternative, helping them focus on the workload value rather than the runtime dependency.
- 00:26:28 — HPE’s position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant — Brad discusses HPE’s leading position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Integrated Platform Consumption Services. This reflects the success of HPE GreenLake and the underlying CloudOps software (Morpheus, OpsRamp, Zerto) in meeting customer demand for acquiring infrastructure as a service (storage, networking, VMs) rather than as discrete components.
- 00:28:29 — Brad’s role as a CMO with an engineering background — Joel notes Brad’s deep product knowledge despite his CMO title. Brad describes himself as an “engineer with low social anxiety who has carried a sales quota.” He values HPE’s engineering roots and strives to stay grounded in the technology while working at the intersection of marketing, sales, and product to bring solutions to life for customers.
- 00:31:20 — Leadership advice: Be curious and have an opinion — In a constrained leadership question, Brad shares advice he’s put into practice. First, “be curious” (inspired by Ted Lasso), involving listening and asking better questions. Second, “have an opinion” and voice it—be informed but don’t stay in the shadows. He encourages rolling up your sleeves to be the change you want to see.
- 00:33:19 — The value of startup experience and accountability — Brad reflects that his proactive attitude was developed, not innate, citing his experience at a startup (Morpheus). He advocates that everyone spend time in an environment where decisions impact making payroll, as it creates urgency and a deep appreciation for how work gets done and its impact on customers.
Episode Info
- Podcast: Modern CTO
- Author: ProSeries Media
- Category: Technology Business Management Careers
- Published: 2025-12-11T12:00:00Z
- Duration: 00:36:01
References
- URL PocketCasts: https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/509a1ca0-c507-0135-9e60-5bb073f92b78/episode/04597eca-5ec2-401f-9b65-a314e57ad676/
- Episode UUID: 04597eca-5ec2-401f-9b65-a314e57ad676
Podcast Info
- Name: Modern CTO
- Type: episodic
- Site: https://moderncto.io
- UUID: 509a1ca0-c507-0135-9e60-5bb073f92b78
Transcript
[00:00:00] Today, we’re talking to Brad Parks from Hewlett Packard Enterprise
[00:00:03] about how he and his team are transforming hybrid cloud.
[00:00:08] You’re listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.
[00:00:15] Morpheus is a huge part of this conversation.
[00:00:17] Can you just give me the 30,000-foot view on what Morpheus is?
[00:00:21] So, I actually worked for HPE for like a decade
[00:00:25] and then left and joined Morpheus about nine years ago
[00:00:28] and then came back in what they would call a boomerang here inside HPE.
[00:00:34] One of the reasons I joined Morpheus,
[00:00:38] I love our origin story, right?
[00:00:40] Like a superhero nerd, right?
[00:00:42] Love my comic books.
[00:00:44] Morpheus was born to make IT easier to consume.
[00:00:49] And if I kind of use a typical day in the life of an IT director,
[00:00:55] the stakeholders of IT, right?
[00:00:58] The people tasking.
[00:00:58] The people tapping IT on the shoulder saying,
[00:01:00] hey, I need my database deployed, my virtual machine deployed.
[00:01:03] And if we think about why public cloud exists,
[00:01:06] they automated the heck out of IT and put it behind a portal
[00:01:10] and, you know, called it Amazon.
[00:01:12] If you look at a big, complicated on-premises data center,
[00:01:17] it’s a lot easier said than done.
[00:01:19] Morpheus helps integrate all of the tools, the technologies,
[00:01:24] the processes, the handoffs.
[00:01:25] So, that same end user of IT,
[00:01:28] can go into a portal, hit a line of code,
[00:01:32] hit a Terraform provider and say,
[00:01:34] I need my database deployed.
[00:01:37] I need my application stack deployed.
[00:01:39] And I don’t want to care if it’s going to live on VMware, KVM, Kubernetes.
[00:01:44] They get what they want on demand.
[00:01:47] So, we really bring the cloud experience, you know, on-prem,
[00:01:52] but we also can wrap our arms around public clouds
[00:01:55] and bring in governance.
[00:01:57] So, it really is the software,
[00:01:58] the software platform layer that big enterprises use
[00:02:01] to make hybrid cloud real.
[00:02:04] And that’s certainly one of the reasons HPE
[00:02:06] did this acquisition last year.
[00:02:08] Yeah, I think cloud did a really good job
[00:02:09] of making things easier, you know,
[00:02:11] because I’m cloud native,
[00:02:13] but I had customers that were on-prem situations.
[00:02:16] So, I kind of got to learn.
[00:02:18] And when I saw the on-prem tools about 15 years ago,
[00:02:20] I was blown away by how archaic they were
[00:02:23] and how much, how difficult it was to get stuff going
[00:02:26] and provisioned and in-prem.
[00:02:28] And what would be normally just a button you click
[00:02:31] in an interface for me as a SaaS cloud native person
[00:02:35] was like tickets and permit,
[00:02:36] like it was just a whole lot of stuff.
[00:02:39] And so-
[00:02:40] I think you picked our first fight, Joel.
[00:02:41] I think you,
[00:02:42] cause you said cloud as something different than on-prem,
[00:02:45] right?
[00:02:45] I’m old, right?
[00:02:46] If you think about how NIST defined what makes a cloud,
[00:02:50] a cloud 11, 12 years ago, it’s not a place, right?
[00:02:53] It’s an operating model.
[00:02:54] It’s being able to have, you know, elastic resources, you know,
[00:02:56] it’s being able to have, you know, elastic resources, you know,
[00:02:57] it’s being able to have, you know, elastic resources, you know,
[00:02:58] it’s being able to have, you know, elastic resources, you know,
[00:02:58] a meter based, accessed over a network, they’re shared.
[00:03:01] And the fifth element is usually where I insert a Bruce Willis joke
[00:03:05] is self-service, right?
[00:03:08] Being able to on-demand get what you want
[00:03:10] without waiting on IT to do their job.
[00:03:13] That transcends locality on-premises
[00:03:16] or in, you know, a Jeff Bezos data center.
[00:03:20] I love it.
[00:03:21] And then, so HPE saw Morpheus growing,
[00:03:23] being a really great solution.
[00:03:25] They wanted to include it in their portfolio.
[00:03:27] So they just,
[00:03:28] purchased you guys.
[00:03:30] It was that simple.
[00:03:31] Yeah.
[00:03:32] Actually, we’ve been working with HPE for,
[00:03:36] I’ll say eight years.
[00:03:37] You know, when I left HPE,
[00:03:39] one of my first calls was back to my old team.
[00:03:41] I said, hey, look,
[00:03:42] I know where HPE is trying to go
[00:03:44] with unlocking the value of on-prem infrastructure
[00:03:47] and making it easier to consume.
[00:03:49] That’s this company I just joined.
[00:03:51] So we’ve been actually co-engineering.
[00:03:53] HPE has been embedding our software in their solutions.
[00:03:57] And actually,
[00:03:58] Morpheus, when we were standalone,
[00:04:01] HPE, Dell, Lenovo, big systems integrators,
[00:04:05] like Accenture, Kendrel, and others,
[00:04:07] all were using our software to make hybrid cloud a reality.
[00:04:12] So about a year ago, HPE said,
[00:04:15] hey, we’re, we want to double down
[00:04:17] and just bring it into the fold.
[00:04:18] And it was actually shortly after HPE had acquired OpsRamp.
[00:04:22] So the investments in platform software have really,
[00:04:27] have really, have really, have really, have really,
[00:04:28] kind of doubled up here in the last 18 to 24 months.
[00:04:33] Well, they’ve been buying a lot, HPE.
[00:04:35] Did they basically let you guys
[00:04:37] just operate in your own bubble or did it go full?
[00:04:40] Like how did the merger go down?
[00:04:41] Are you guys in your own little culture,
[00:04:43] in your own little bubble, or are you all integrated?
[00:04:45] You know, I joke, I got my comeuppance
[00:04:48] because when I was actually at HPE before,
[00:04:51] I was on the acquisition team
[00:04:52] for a couple of storage technologies.
[00:04:55] We acquired 3PAR and then Nimbus,
[00:04:57] and we were all in Nimbus Storage,
[00:05:00] and I was part of the acquire-er and merging those in.
[00:05:05] Now I’m getting, getting acquired.
[00:05:08] So I get to see, see what life’s like on the other side.
[00:05:10] But one of the things I think I learned
[00:05:13] when I was on the acquisition side
[00:05:16] is a lot of acquisitions look good on paper,
[00:05:19] but they don’t ever come to fruition.
[00:05:21] And sometimes that’s because, you know,
[00:05:25] a company can wrap, bubble wrap, around, you know, an asset,
[00:05:27] with HPE, we really ripped the bandaid off and just said, we are going to go mainstream with
[00:05:35] this thing. And it’s been exciting because we now have kind of released new products like Morpheus
[00:05:41] VM Essentials. We have embedded that software inside some of the private cloud products that
[00:05:47] HPE has, like Private Cloud Business Edition. We’ve already done integrations with Juniper. So
[00:05:53] we are, you know, we are really helping to transform a good chunk of HPE into a software-led
[00:06:00] hybrid infrastructure conversation. So it’s very exciting.
[00:06:06] How does that work? I’m a little bit of a nerd with the business stuff. Does the larger parent
[00:06:11] org set goals and then like you would work with Juniper or is this teams within each that are
[00:06:16] just trying to build? How does that actually get like happen? Big companies like drawing org charts
[00:06:22] at big companies is tough and a little mind-numbing. But if you think about it, at the
[00:06:29] larger level, Antonio and the board of directors has set out, hey, we need to make, you know, we
[00:06:35] need to make profitability goals as a, you know, public-facing company. Think about things like
[00:06:40] free cash flow. Think about the business of HPE. And as part of that, obviously, how are we helping
[00:06:48] customers that are investing in technology, right? Where those two meet is how you create a
[00:06:52] business. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think
[00:06:52] the big macro areas are, you know, networking, obviously, huge, you know, huge push with the
[00:07:00] acquisition of Aruba many, many years ago. And then bringing in Juniper, we now have a massive
[00:07:07] networking stack. Well, what’s connected to those networks? A whole bunch of servers. We sell about
[00:07:13] 800,000 servers a year, underpinned by storage. And then where software comes in, really, it’s
[00:07:19] kind of the glue that helps, like I said, unlock all of those networks. And so, you know,
[00:07:22] all of that. So each of those kind of hardware or product business units are entities in and of
[00:07:29] themselves. But we have a lot of cross-functional working teams where we’re threading the intellectual
[00:07:34] property across each other. So networking works with compute. Software works with everybody.
[00:07:40] You know, it all kind of comes together in how we show up for customers, right? They shouldn’t
[00:07:45] have to wade through, you know, a catalog menu of, you know, a thousand choices and assemble
[00:07:51] things in a data center. And so, you know, we have a lot of cross-functional working teams.
[00:07:52] We really want customers to think about, you know, how am I getting to a cloud operating
[00:07:59] model? How am I taking advantage of some of the innovations happening around AI? How do I
[00:08:06] transform how I think about infrastructure? Those are the big macro trends that then we,
[00:08:11] you know, inside the tent are working together to make sure we’re showing up and helping customers
[00:08:16] and kind of tackle their big projects. Is HPE and HP, are they all under the same
[00:08:22] umbrella?
[00:08:22] Are they separate? How does that work?
[00:08:24] Oh, HP and HPE? That was a, I am dating myself. I’m going to get the date wrong. I think it was about
[00:08:31] 10, 10, 11 years ago. I think we just hit our 10-year kind of standalone company anniversary,
[00:08:37] actually. So HP, you know, was a stalwart in Silicon Valley, right? I mean, one of the first
[00:08:44] big, you know, big companies that Hewlett and Packard pulled together. But about 10 years ago,
[00:08:50] HP and HPE started.
[00:08:52] Split. So the personal systems, PCs, printers, laptops, all of that went with HP Inc. All the
[00:09:02] business, you know, systems, compute, storage, networking, and the software we’re talking about
[00:09:07] today, as well as the services with that went with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So we’re on our own,
[00:09:13] but share a lot of that core DNA with our brethren over on the HP Inc. side.
[00:09:19] Awesome. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
[00:09:22] So let’s talk about, you did some stuff with Daniel’s company, Futurum Group. You did a tech
[00:09:27] field day. Yeah. I have, I have known those guys before they were Daniel’s group. Yes.
[00:09:32] I know. Oh yeah.
[00:09:33] Stephen Foskett and team. I look at Futurum and it’s like some of my best friends,
[00:09:38] the Evaluator Group, CTO Advisor with Keith. Keith? Oh, you know Keith?
[00:09:44] I’ve known Keith for a long time. I’ve known Stephen Foskett for a long time. So yeah,
[00:09:48] I know that crew well. Small world, man.
[00:09:52] This makes me feel good. So what did you talk about at the cloud field day?
[00:09:58] Well, it would really was kind of taking the, that portfolio that I mentioned and bringing it to life
[00:10:04] with the, the participants in the room, right? The delegates. Actually, one of my, one of my best
[00:10:09] hires ever was a guy I met as a delegate. He was a, you know, cloud engineer, Martez Reed, who was
[00:10:15] one of the delegates in one of my first cloud field days and spent many years with him. So I
[00:10:20] love the, the delegate interaction at cloud field day.
[00:10:22] Cause you get a lot of good kind of real-time feedback from either actual practitioners
[00:10:27] into customers or, or folks on the analyst front who kind of see laterally across the industry.
[00:10:33] The way we unpacked field day really kind of a few chapters. We broke our 90 minutes into
[00:10:39] I think four segments. One was just setting the table, talking about how these acquisitions have
[00:10:46] manifested themselves in a, you know, a coherent software stack that spans,
[00:10:52] on-prem environments, co-location environments and public cloud with assets like Morpheus, OpsRamp and
[00:11:00] Zerto. That’s not something we, we think about as the cloud ops software suite. We then kind of dove
[00:11:07] into how we’re taking that software and bringing it together inside, you know, easy to use pre-engineered
[00:11:14] private cloud systems. So we spent some time doing that. And then we actually unpacked a lot of the
[00:11:21] work we’ve done in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the,
[00:11:22] in the runtime environment. So one of the assets that Morpheus has had is the ability not just to
[00:11:29] connect to, you know, VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft, you know, other hypervisors. We actually have our
[00:11:36] own built-in KVM based hypervisor and our own CNCF certified Kubernetes layout. So we can,
[00:11:45] you know, unlock the power of existing third-party hypervisors and Kubernetes technologies, but
[00:11:52] we also have our own that we’ve now brought, you know, brought to bear with products like HPE,
[00:11:58] Morpheus, VM Essentials. So there was a little discussion around, you know, what do we do around
[00:12:04] our VMware workloads? How do we navigate that conversation? It’s certainly one that a lot of
[00:12:09] customers are going through as they think about their relationship with hypervisor companies,
[00:12:14] container companies like Red Hat, public cloud companies like AWS and Azure.
[00:12:20] How would you explain a tech field data?
[00:12:22] To somebody who doesn’t know what it is?
[00:12:25] Nerds of a feather, a little bit, right? It’s, it’s, I love it because having been a practitioner
[00:12:33] for the first decade, right? I was an IT guy, wrote software, was a DBA. Second 10 years,
[00:12:40] I was on the vendor side as a product manager. Third decade, went to a little bitty startup,
[00:12:45] Morpheus. I think sometimes in large companies, you know, corporate marketing gets a hold of
[00:12:52] things.
[00:12:52] And, you know, it gets, you know, it gets up-leveled for outbound consumption.
[00:12:57] Why I’ve always loved Cloud Field Day is it, it just gives, you know, technologists a chance to
[00:13:03] talk in context. And I liken it to the Budweiser hot seat of old for the Super Bowl viewers from
[00:13:10] the Americas, right? It gives folks like myself, our, you know, our engineers a chance to talk to
[00:13:16] actual practitioners, talk about what we have, but get real-time questions and feedback in an
[00:13:22] unfiltered way.
[00:13:23] That’s pretty cool. I think this was recorded too, right?
[00:13:26] Yeah. Yeah. You can go to the Tech Field Day channel and get the Cloud Field Day assets. And I
[00:13:34] think it’s broken into four, four chapters.
[00:13:36] Can you read off the URL to me?
[00:13:38] No.
[00:13:39] I’m kidding.
[00:13:40] I’m kidding.
[00:13:41] Josh, Josh will look it up.
[00:13:42] Stephen Foskett’s like, come on, Brad. I know, I know it’s out there somewhere.
[00:13:45] Josh is going to hunt down that Tech Field Day recording from YouTube and post it in the show
[00:13:52] notes if you’re interested in learning more about that.
[00:13:54] Like and subscribe. We can do the little…
[00:13:55] Like and subscribe. Yeah. Because you caught, you talked a lot about like the Cloud Ops suite,
[00:13:59] the private cloud portfolio. You covered all of that inside of the Tech Field Day.
[00:14:03] Yeah, we went, we went deep. We did, I think we did a little show and tell demo. I had some, you
[00:14:08] know, some friends who are much smarter than I who were going a little deeper on the tech. And so I
[00:14:12] think we can unpack some of those topics here on the show.
[00:14:14] Topics here on the podcast. And then it would be great if folks wanted to go over to Field Day to
[00:14:19] kind of go down a notch and actually see, see some product demos and see some of the questions from
[00:14:24] the delegates.
[00:14:25] The real question is like, how do you, the, the practitioners that are having this, how do they
[00:14:30] communicate this to, to their senior people? Is it a cost thing? Is it like, hey, this is going to
[00:14:36] help with cost? How do they make that business case?
[00:14:39] Yeah, from a, from a software perspective, if we start at that layer,
[00:14:44] I think it’s all about helping IT be both more effective and more efficient. So you hit, you know,
[00:14:52] you hit two sides of it, which is always the case when you’re here, when you’re doing this. When I,
[00:14:58] when I think about Morpheus’s origin story, right, we, we actually were created by a bunch of
[00:15:03] application developers who are transforming the application stacks at dozens of companies. They
[00:15:09] actually built the core DNA of, of Morpheus to get their job done.
[00:15:13] It was only after running for a few years as an internal project that they said, hey, I think there’s
[00:15:19] some big companies trying to, you know, trying to do this hybrid cloud thing, trying to do digital
[00:15:24] transformation. We could probably build a company out of this. So, you know, if I look at that, they
[00:15:30] had to be very effective at doing their job, right? They had to deploy new applications very quickly,
[00:15:36] independent of where those applications were going to live, but also they were part of a, a very
[00:15:42] large private company.
[00:15:43] Right.
[00:15:44] And they had to be very efficient in how they thought about cost, how they took time out of the equation to, to reduce the amount of full-time employees that it took to, you know, to manage their environment. So those are the two sides of the coin, effectiveness and efficiency.
[00:16:09] I like it. And then you’ve had T-Mobile as a customer. What did you do with them?
[00:16:12] Yeah.
[00:16:13] I think our, our use case for, we have a lot of large customers in, in a variety of industries, right?
[00:16:18] Morpheus and CloudOps kind of the software conversation has done very well in highly regulated industries where there’s some data or application gravity where those workloads and the data associated with those workloads still need to run on prep for a number of reasons.
[00:16:38] But those same companies have some of their applications and some of their products.
[00:16:42] Yeah.
[00:16:43] And some of their product teams working in the public cloud. So you think about folks like T-Mobile and, you know, in technology service providers, right? They’re trying to do software development to help their company obviously delight their customers, be worth money, operate more effectively. Other industries we’ve done very well in healthcare. Similarly, pharmaceutical. AstraZeneca is one we’ve talked about for a long time. Their, you know, their users are doing things like genome sequencing models.
[00:17:11] Yeah.
[00:17:12] Need to deploy databases for analytics, right? Internal applications. Federal government, another one where, you know, they’re not running a lot up in the public cloud. They’ve got very highly sensitive information, yet those organizations want to operate in a, in a cloud native fashion to steal what you said, but they, they have to do it with their on-prem resources.
[00:17:33] So across those industries, you get a common denominator of IT kind of trying to get out of its own way.
[00:17:40] Right.
[00:17:41] I say that as a guy who did turn wrenches and, you know, bang a keyboard and, and run, run an IT shop once upon a time.
[00:17:46] Oh, we can talk badly about nerds here on the show.
[00:17:49] Because we are them.
[00:17:50] You know, I think if I look at the demands on IT over the last decade, two decades, right? The demands have increased disproportionate to the humans that are running IT, right? That very simply, right? If you look at that curve, the, the gap between the half and the other half, right?
[00:18:08] Yeah.
[00:18:09] Yeah.
[00:18:10] The, the gaps between the haves and the have nots, right? I need to provision new apps. I need to provision new resources. I’m doing internal app development as a, you know, everyone’s a software company now, if I go back to software eating the world, right?
[00:18:22] The needs of IT to move faster and to enable their internal stakeholders has, you know, has hit a critical threshold.
[00:18:30] And one of the things I think standing honestly in the way of a lot of companies taking advantage of AI, right? That’s, you know, that’s one of the next waves.
[00:18:39] There are a lot of big companies still just trying to get to that cloud operating model.
[00:18:43] So, you know, you can’t build the next thing if you have it, you know, don’t have a good foundation.
[00:18:49] So there’s a lot of interest in helping, again, helping IT kind of get out of its own way so that they can move faster at a lower price point.
[00:18:59] What challenge was the University of Utah facing?
[00:19:02] University of Utah.
[00:19:04] Yeah.
[00:19:04] So universities and higher ed in general is an interesting one.
[00:19:10] When I was graduating uni years and years ago, I was, you know, an intern inside the College of, you know, Business, right?
[00:19:19] Higher ed is an interesting one because it’s a lot like a service provider for these little fiefdoms, right?
[00:19:25] You’ve got central IT trying to help the university system, but you’ve got a lot of autonomy with the College of Engineering.
[00:19:34] The College of Business, the, you know, liberal arts group.
[00:19:38] They each, you know, kind of want to do their own thing.
[00:19:41] So service providers is a big market for us where you want centralized control, centralized shared infrastructure, but you also want to kind of enable autonomy.
[00:19:54] And that means you need a platform approach.
[00:19:56] You need things like multi-tenancy, role-based access, guardrails, so that central IT can kind of set that paved road.
[00:20:04] Then get out of the way and let those fiefdoms kind of have their, have their playground while still staying in the rails.
[00:20:12] So that’s a common, honestly, in higher ed, but also the other use cases we’ve talked about.
[00:20:19] That’s pretty cool.
[00:20:20] Yeah.
[00:20:21] I was, I was surprised.
[00:20:21] I did some work with like Harvard and I remember like talking with their IT team and find out they had over 200 people.
[00:20:28] And I was like, whoa, I was like, really?
[00:20:31] Okay.
[00:20:31] Yeah.
[00:20:32] It’s big in a lot of the universities.
[00:20:34] It’s big in a lot of the universities.
[00:20:34] It’s big in a lot of the universities.
[00:20:34] It’s not just, you know, one campus.
[00:20:36] Most of them have a, you know, an online campus.
[00:20:38] They might have branch campuses in different cities.
[00:20:41] And so you take that kind of central hub and spoke fiefdom model and then multiply that by other geographies and it can get, it can get complex pretty quick.
[00:20:51] Also, every employee is like a customer to them.
[00:20:54] Yeah.
[00:20:54] Right?
[00:20:54] Because like you’re.
[00:20:56] The end users often are, you know, like I said, AstraZeneca might be a genome sequencing data scientist who’s doing work.
[00:21:03] Yeah.
[00:21:04] At higher ed, it could be a grad student doing a project for a professor on the weekend that needs a, you know, a database cluster stood up.
[00:21:12] They shouldn’t have to submit a ticket, wait in line, and then get what they need two weeks from now, you know, after, you know, after IT, you know, ends up wiring everything together.
[00:21:23] They should be able to, you know, go into a portal, hit a button, get what they want two minutes after they asked for it, whether that’s on-prem or in the public cloud.
[00:21:34] So, and I’m just trying to wrap my mind around it personally.
[00:21:38] So I’m going to say some stuff.
[00:21:40] You tell me if it’s wrong or right.
[00:21:41] It feels like what it does is it gives you the same interface and then basically on-prem or cloud is, ends up being like a dropdown.
[00:21:49] And so I get to provision and have all my experience and learn the UI and get really fast in this way of, of doing things.
[00:21:56] And then where the data physically is, is kind of just like a little option afterthought.
[00:22:01] Is that right?
[00:22:02] Yeah.
[00:22:03] It’s an abstraction model.
[00:22:04] We’ve abstracted a number of different concepts, not just cloud, right?
[00:22:09] Meaning where those workloads live, but also the other dependencies.
[00:22:13] So things like your IP address management system, right?
[00:22:17] Your ITSM systems, your networking stack, your get repos where all your, you know, automation tools live, right?
[00:22:25] We’ve, we’ve set up service interfaces around all of those technologies and then we’re orchestrating the handoffs so that,
[00:22:34] the underlying technology becomes less, less relevant, or at least less one dimensional.
[00:22:40] And so to your point, um, you know, I’ve been on a lot of planes over the last few years, you know, with whoever’s sitting next to me.
[00:22:48] And when they ask, it’s, it’s a little like Google translate for IT, right?
[00:22:51] You should be able to, you know, write to Morpheus, call our API set, call our Terraform provider, and then come independent of where that workload lives.
[00:23:02] We will.
[00:23:02] Provision the VM, get an IP address, register a DNS entry, configure a VIT behind a load balancer, set up a backup job, install a monitoring agent, right?
[00:23:13] All of the, you know, orchestration that it takes to, to bring an application to life.
[00:23:19] That’s what we orchestrate in an agnostic way.
[00:23:23] And so you’re just out there making people’s lives easier.
[00:23:25] What’s the next thing on the radar?
[00:23:27] What’s, what do you, what do you, what nut are you trying to crack right now as far as making lives easier?
[00:23:31] I think one of the.
[00:23:32] Biggies that’s been, uh, you know, been popular, uh, for the last few years, right.
[00:23:38] Is, you know, the concept of eliminating lock-in, right?
[00:23:41] I think whether you’re with a specific hypervisor company, a specific, you know, Kubernetes flavor, a specific public cloud, you know, I’ve, I’ve talked with hundreds of CIOs and customers over the last handful of years and things are messy and hybrid cloud is an inevitability.
[00:24:02] Um, more than a strategy almost, I think for many, many customers, whether that’s because teams have an affinity to a certain stack, um, M and a happens where a company buys a, you know, buys another company and they’re using, you know, X public cloud versus Y public cloud or a hypervisor versus B hypervisor.
[00:24:23] So being able to, to think about the workload, the actual database, the web service, the application stack.
[00:24:32] Yeah.
[00:24:32] And then eliminate some of the hard line dependencies to the underlying runtime, where that workload lives has been a big, you know, a big effort.
[00:24:43] And one of the things that we brought to the forefront as part of HPE is our own built in KVM runtime and our own built in Kubernetes flavor.
[00:24:55] I’ve always said that, that Morpheus didn’t have a dog in the fight because, you know, we want to make those other third-party technologies better.
[00:25:02] And if I.
[00:25:02] If I pick on VMware as an example, right.
[00:25:06] Morpheus has won best of VM world multiple times for turning VMware into the private cloud, you know, that it should be.
[00:25:15] But, um, as costs have risen, as people’s licensing agreements have changed with different vendors, we’ve had a lot of customers who have said, Hey, we already use you for up stack orchestration.
[00:25:26] You know, we see that you have your own KVM based runtime.
[00:25:29] You know, can we start landing some of our workloads on that?
[00:25:32] So that’s.
[00:25:32] That’s something HPE invested in, and we actually released a version of Morpheus called Morpheus VM essentials, which is kind of packaged for a virtualization centric customer and it, it integrates with both VMware, but also HPE’s native HVM hypervisor.
[00:25:50] So we now have, I’ll say we have a dog in the fight, but, you know, overall, our goal is to, to focus more on the workload and make the underlying runtime much less relevant because.
[00:26:02] The, the application is what delivers value back to the business at the end of the day.
[00:26:07] That’s what I want.
[00:26:08] I want all the companies working together, being friends and competing to make my life better.
[00:26:13] Yes.
[00:26:13] You, you shouldn’t have to care as a, as a customer.
[00:26:17] And that’s good.
[00:26:17] Cause I don’t.
[00:26:20] No, I.
[00:26:21] And then I saw your post on LinkedIn about you being in the top right of the HP, like for the Gartner magic quadrant.
[00:26:28] Yeah.
[00:26:28] That’s always.
[00:26:28] Yeah.
[00:26:28] That’s, that’s worth a dance.
[00:26:30] Yeah, for sure.
[00:26:32] So.
[00:26:32] Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that.
[00:26:34] So, you know, the, the magic quadrant has been around for a long time, right?
[00:26:37] You know, Gartner’s built a full business stack around how, you know, how they, as an example of an external analyst will provide guidance to, to customers on how to make different investment choices.
[00:26:51] They do it for storage, for compute, for virtualization.
[00:26:55] This particular one you’re referring to is around integrated platform consumption services, which is kind of a mouthful.
[00:27:02] I don’t know.
[00:27:02] A lot of IT directors that have a budget center for that, right.
[00:27:05] That as opposed to storage or compute.
[00:27:08] Um, but what it was, was talking about, um, this move for customers to start thinking about how they acquire infrastructure in a different way, as opposed to buying a rack of servers and wiring it up with storage and buying a bunch of networking switches and assembling that inside a data center.
[00:27:29] They don’t want to think about it to our point.
[00:27:31] They just.
[00:27:32] They don’t want to access platform, platform services, whether that’s storage as a service, networking as a service, or, you know, VMs as a service.
[00:27:39] So things like HPE GreenLake, Dell Apex, Lenovo TrueScale, uh, Pure has one, Cisco has one, right?
[00:27:48] Uh, the vendor landscape has, has shifted in this direction as customers want that kind of cloud approach to acquiring infrastructure.
[00:27:57] So the most recent MQ was, was about that set of services.
[00:28:02] And, and yeah, HPE was about as far into the right as you can get, which I was very proud of.
[00:28:07] And that was really a reflection of HPE GreenLake and the investments and innovation we’ve done with some of the underlying software like Morpheus, OpsRamp, and Zerto, which we’ve most recently brought out as the, the CloudOps suite.
[00:28:23] You seem to have a lot of product knowledge, pretty smart business guy, but you also have a CMO title.
[00:28:29] You do marketing too?
[00:28:31] Um.
[00:28:32] One of these days I’m going to write a, a blog, like expect more from your CMO.
[00:28:37] Um, I, I’ve, I’ve joked that I’m a, you know, I’m a engineer with low social anxiety who, you know, has carried a sales quota.
[00:28:45] So I have had multiple, multiple jobs.
[00:28:48] I, um, I like to have the illusion that I’m still technically relevant, but it has been a long time since I’ve sat in front of a Linux command line.
[00:28:56] But I, you know, got a CS degree.
[00:28:58] I have done the work for, for about a decade.
[00:29:00] But really I’m focused more on.
[00:29:02] How do we, how do we bring these products to life in a way that’s meaningful for, you know, for customers.
[00:29:08] But, you know, when I look at across the vendor landscape and I’ve worked with all of them, one of the reasons I love HPE is it really has its roots in engineering, right?
[00:29:18] It is, it is an engineering company at its heart, right?
[00:29:22] It still has an invested labs function where we do pure R and D, you know, that that’s important as a, as a guy who used to buy IT, right?
[00:29:32] You, you know, you’re not buying from a supply chain company or the world’s best marketing company.
[00:29:37] At the end of the day, you need these products to work.
[00:29:38] So I’m, even though I’ve had that CMO title, I’m still grounded in what the technology does and, and have, have some degree of depth in how it works.
[00:29:48] And, and so, yeah, I, I like to sit at that intersection of, uh, marketing sales, go to market engineering, uh, product.
[00:29:57] I found my always, I’ll be the most extroverted introvert in the room.
[00:30:01] I love it.
[00:30:01] I love it.
[00:30:02] He described yourself, you know, that’s, that’s, you got a high level of self-awareness, but yeah, I, uh, do, you know, just software engineering, like hands on keyboard for 20 years.
[00:30:12] And then when the podcast got popular, I felt almost like, uh, uh, like I betrayed my people, you know, like I just got dirty, right?
[00:30:22] A little bit.
[00:30:23] Cause I’m not sitting there, you know, writing Ruby all day or whatnot.
[00:30:26] Uh, but yeah, it’s, uh, it’s fun now.
[00:30:30] Every time I’m talking about.
[00:30:32] That stuff or I always like add that little prerequisite.
[00:30:34] Well, like I’m not, I’ve been hands on for like seven years, but I did it for 20.
[00:30:39] So yeah, my credibility with every year, maybe it goes down from an engineering.
[00:30:43] I have a, I have a, a, a good phone, a friend, uh, you know, Rolodex, but I’m, you know, when we were building up Morpheus as a standalone, um, it was just kind of the best day of nine years of my life.
[00:30:54] Cause some of the smartest software developers on the planet that, that I’ve ever had the, the, the, the joy of working with.
[00:31:01] And now.
[00:31:01] As part of HPE, they’ve, you know, that team of 20 or 30 engineers is now 200 or 300 and HPE is investing heavily in, in the software stack and the underlying runtime.
[00:31:13] So it’s exciting to see that come to life inside a much bigger stage.
[00:31:18] Well, I’m going to ask you a couple of leadership questions and then we can wrap up.
[00:31:20] Is that okay with you?
[00:31:21] Yeah, please.
[00:31:23] Okay.
[00:31:23] So since we’re both nerds here, I’m going to give you some constraints.
[00:31:27] I’m going to ask you for leadership advice, but it’s going to have some constraints to it.
[00:31:29] Okay.
[00:31:30] Uh, the constraint is.
[00:31:31] You must have, somebody must’ve told you this advice, you put it into practice and it’s been with you for a long time.
[00:31:40] It, it worked when you put it into practice and you’ve carried it with you to today.
[00:31:43] What advice is that?
[00:31:46] Ooh, I will steal a line from one of the best TV shows to come out of the, uh, you know, out of the, uh, pandemic, which was Ted Lasso.
[00:31:57] Right.
[00:31:58] I think.
[00:31:59] Yeah.
[00:32:00] The, the dartboard scene.
[00:32:02] Right.
[00:32:02] For those who’ve seen the show, I, uh, our CRO and I have used, you know, as we’re out talking to different sales teams, different, different customers, but be curious, I think is, is one of those core principles that I think we can all appreciate.
[00:32:19] And, uh, you know, it involves, you know, listening, asking better questions, you know, having some empathy.
[00:32:25] There’s a lot to unpack, you know, in that, uh, in that scene, if you go and, uh, Google it on YouTube.
[00:32:31] Uh.
[00:32:31] But be curious, definitely a piece of advice.
[00:32:35] Um, I think the other side of that, you know, particularly for those dumb enough to ask me for career advice, but on the vendor side is, is have an opinion and don’t be afraid to, you know, to voice it, make it informed and be curious and, you know, do the diligence.
[00:32:50] But there are a lot of people who have great ideas and don’t, you know, don’t get out of the shadows and actually bring them to life.
[00:32:58] So roll up sleeves and go, you know, go make your voice.
[00:33:01] And, uh, be the change you want to see in the world, if that’s not too ambitious.
[00:33:06] Get it done.
[00:33:07] Now, do you think that you’re just naturally like, I’m like, I’m naturally like that.
[00:33:11] Like, that’s just part of who I am.
[00:33:13] Is that something that you were, uh, born with, or do you think that’s something you’ve developed?
[00:33:19] I think I developed it.
[00:33:20] I worked for a little startup in, in the early days.
[00:33:23] Um, uh, and then inside a big company, I do think I would encourage everybody that to do time at a startup.
[00:33:29] Well, even if that’s a skunk.
[00:33:31] You know, if you’re building a big corks project inside a big company, right?
[00:33:34] There are a lot of kind of startups inside big companies, but you know, when I first joined a joint Morpheus, I think I was number.
[00:33:42] I was in the teens of employees and, uh, had come from a, you know, obviously $4 billion portfolio inside HPE.
[00:33:49] Where my team was 25 people, you know, mentioned a couple of ideas to, uh, you know, the founding team.
[00:33:57] I said, yeah, those are great.
[00:33:58] You should go do that.
[00:33:59] Like look in the mirror.
[00:34:00] Like there.
[00:34:01] team. We ran extremely lean. So, you know, I built the website, put up the, you know,
[00:34:07] trade show booth, you know, did like the hands-on, you know, back to rolling up sleeves and
[00:34:12] working for a living. I think everybody should spend time, you know, where their decisions have
[00:34:19] an impact on making payroll, you know, the next, you know, the next two weeks puts a certain amount
[00:34:24] of urgency and accountability into the work that we do. And so the closer you can get to getting
[00:34:31] the work done, I think the, you know, the more appreciation you’re going to have for, you know,
[00:34:36] how it gets done and what the impact is for the customers that you serve. Awesome. Well, Brad,
[00:34:42] we did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel? Thank you so much for listening. And if you found
[00:34:49] this episode useful, please share it with a friend or a colleague who you think would get value from
[00:34:53] it.
[00:34:53] And if you
[00:34:54] have topics that you’d like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me
[00:35:00] an email, joel at moderncto.io. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes
[00:35:07] my day and inspires me to keep going.