VMblog:  As a VMworld 2018 sponsor, how can people find you this year? 

Brad Parks:  This year at VMworld, you can find us at Booth #2136.  We've upgraded to a 10 x 20 booth this year... we doubled sales since the last VMworld, so we figured we'd double the footprint at the show. VMworld has always been a technical show, so we've got the technologists outnumbering the rest of us 3 to 1... including our 2 co-founders, CTO, and VP of Engineering.

VMblog:  Can you give readers a few reasons why your product or service is considered unique? 

Parks:  Morpheus was built by Practitioners for Practitioners: We got our start as an internal tool developed by a DevOps team within a $1.5B private equity company.  This team needed to rapidly develop, deploy, and manage applications at dozens of different portfolio companies using an unpredictable mix of heterogeneous infrastructure.  After 5 years being used to transform IT for the portfolio, Morpheus was spun out as an external tool and is now the standard cloud management platform for some of the largest enterprises in the world.

By enabling Developers, Ops teams, and Business users to equally get their core needs met we help customers address the people and process side of digital transformation while also unifying disparate tools and technologies to improve the value of existing and new investments.

In addition to the time savings from automated self-service and cost savings which comes from VM/cloud rightsizing there are 3 dimensions that set us apart from the crowd.

1)      Time to Value - Up and running in under an hour:  Fully automate complex workflows quickly with deep integrations into a massive library of clouds and tools.   This is in contrast to other products that require in-depth service engagements to wire together a network of third party plug-ins. 

2)      Maximum Agility - Don't get painted into a corner:  Deploy app stacks that mix bare metal, VMs, and containers across premises and clouds.  This is in contrast to tools from VMware, RedHat, Pivotal, AWS, or Azure that are primarily designed for a single vendor ‘stack'. 

3)      Minimize Risk - Keep your intellectual property from walking out the door:  Single system of record and a safety net for digital disruption so you don't lose time, money, and innovation due to organizational change

VMblog:  Can you give VMblog readers a sneak peek as to what you will be showing off at your booth this year?  What should attendees expect to see and hear at your booth?

Parks:  On the technical side it's been a busy summer... we completely revamped the availability connections into our self-service engine and added new integrations for Zerto. 

We also added a SDN module so can provision and manage Cisco ACI and VMware NSX as part of deployment workflows. 

On the cloud front, we support over 20 public and private clouds so come check out the world beyond automation for AWS.  We can enable push-button VM and Application Stack deployments into virtually any platform and cloud. 

Parks:  It's going to be my first VMware event with Morpheus after having spent many a VMworld attached to the storage industry.  My own journey from storage specialist to the world of multi-cloud and DevOps isn't that far removed from changes in the event itself.  As traditional architectures have made way for hyper-converged and integrated systems, so has the tone and tenor of the event changed with the times. Recently it evolved again, moving beyond the integrated systems hype to increasing focus on cloud, containerization, and automation.  I'm excited to see that momentum continue this year and proud that Morpheus is at the center of many large-scale customer transformations with our next generation cloud management platform.   

In advance of VMworld, I spoke with many of our customers, partners, and solution architects to tease out exactly why our unified approach to multi-cloud self-service and orchestration has been so transformational.  I took the data points and put together an Infographic that may wet your appetite enough to swing by the booth.

VMblog:  Who should stop by your booth... and what's your target market?

Parks:  When it comes to multi-cloud and DevOps, it's a party that everybody is involved in.   In fact these projects fail if all the stakeholders are not equally represented.  And that's where we fit as a Unified Multi-Cloud Orchestration provider. 

For Infrastructure teams, we provide enable a standard management overlay across what would otherwise be a heterogenous mix of disconnected cloud platforms and tools. In terms of ease of use we provide a simple GUI overlay on top of many Dev-centric tools such as Ansible, Chef, Salt, Puppet, HashiCorp Terraform, Packer, etc.  

For Developers, we provide a robust API/CLI with nearly 450 commands, so teams can ‘bring their own tools' and accelerate app modernization.   Teams can tie into Jenkins and Git for code deploys plus take advantage of our JSON/YAML DSL or use Terraform and Microsoft ARM templates to enable Infrastructure as Code. 

For Business teams, we provide optimization via analytics, cloud brokering, and approvals to optimize both brown and greenfield sites including simple interfaces via ServiceNow so teams don't need to learn anything new.  

VMblog:  Finally, attendees always enjoy a good trade show tchotchke.  Are you guys giving away anything special or interesting this year?

Parks:  With lessons learned from our Mac toting DevOps brothers we've been told we've got some of the best stickers and t-shirts in the business.... This batch was inspired by a couple of the spring sci-fi and superhero blockbusters.

As somebody who's been to hundreds of trade shows as an engineer and as a vendor I know the bar is high with t-shirts.  When I see that somebody at a show chooses to wear my shirt on day 2 and 3 instead of something they packed in their luggage I know we have a winner.