Morpheus Data

Niu Solutions, a UK-based managed service provider, was seeking a cloud orchestration solution that could accelerate deployments while maintaining the quality of solutions provided. The company wanted to balance the benefits of IT automation with the skills of its technical team. Many of the orchestration solutions they evaluated were oriented toward vendor lock-in rather than taking a cloud-agnostic approach. Another major driving force behind Niu’s requirement was the deepening issue of ‘shadow IT’ being felt by customers. Shadow IT creates huge budgetary, security and compliance problems, particularly troublesome in highly-regulated industries like financial services and retail. Niu’s long-term view was to enable customers with more dynamic, self-serve capabilities, and bring the benefits of easy deployment but without the associated risks.

AstraZeneca’s Global Infrastructure Services (GIS) division acts as the centralized architecture and engineering team to support the huge volumes of IaaS and PaaS requests coming from seven key business units. Like most industries today, bio-pharmaceuticals is a segment where time is the enemy. Speed is the currency of competitive differentiation and as such the GIS leadership is under constant pressure to deliver more value in less time. After analyzing processes, the team determined that developer requests for resources took an average of 80 man-hours to fully deliver in a production ready state because of manual handoffs and approvals across systems and teams. The company was simply growing too quickly to continue with this type of bottleneck. The GIS team knew that unless they introduced additional automation and orchestration to streamline their processes, it could hinder future delivery times to their internal clients.

The company, a leading EMEA based FinTech Company specializing in optimizing high-speed financial trading, was facing a major gap between its development and operations teams. With over 5,000 users on its mission-critical platform, the organization needed effective DevOps to rapidly deliver new features that would satisfy user demand and outpace other providers in this highly competitive market. However, while the development part of the equation was moving fast, the operations team had yet to transform. Centralized IT operations were still utilizing legacy approaches to provisioning and software release, which meant rolling out new software features could be delayed up to 6 weeks. This caused cultural problems, creating a rift between app-dev and IT operations teams. The organization recognized that the only way to succeed in their DevOps initiative was to enable true self-service for development teams.

REN’s significant domestic and international growth coupled with a drive to further improve performance and quality of service lead to them commissioning two new datacentres in 2018 to host the country’s critical information and telecommunications systems. REN’s original datacentres were siloed, hundreds of kilometers apart, and focused on Disaster Recovery (DR) as the primary use case. Provisioning new applications or VMs took two to three weeks, involved stitching together disconnected technologies, and was both manual and error-prone. In addition, a focus on Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning rather than application architecture, a lack of telemetry and analytics, and the understandable difficulties of knowledge sharing amongst distributed employees and contractors gave the team at REN significant challenges as they tried to position themselves for future growth. Faced with technical debt and legacy processes, REN recognized the possibilities offered by implementing a unified approach to application orchestration and automation. Their new mission was to achieve a single end-to-end workflow with complete visibility to all stakeholders.

The large multi-campus state university had a diverse and open IT operations structure, with each college and administrative unit in charge of its local IT needs. A centralized IT services team focused on offering shared access to certain IT services, including hosted private cloud for dozens of groups and hundreds of end users. The university's virtual machine (VM) hosting service had built its own homegrown portal to serve the university. However, due to new IT priorities, the homegrown portal was no longer a key initiative moving forward. This triggered the need to find a new approach for self-service VM hosting and private cloud that was less brittle and easier to maintain. The IT team was ready to get out of the “wrench-turning” business of manually provisioning applications and VMs to university end users, many of whom had non-technical skillsets. These users often needed access to IT services after hours or on weekends and desired a self-service approach to provisioning. It was time to find a way to reduce service ticket volume, centralize hosted VM platforms, and up service delivery.

EUMETSAT, an intergovernmental organization that operates an extensive system of meteorological satellites, recognized changes in users expectations, needs, and behavior in relation to the use of its data. More users wanted to benefit from self-service provisioning and hosted services on a common data lake ideally in conjunction with their own local IT environments. These new demands, combined with EUMETSAT’s internal IT needs, resulted in the definition of two fundamental domains: mission-critical and general purpose. Both of these required external elasticity as well as an architecture that would allow a seamless user experience and access to hosted software and data services. To achieve this, EUMETSAT needed the flexibility to bridge a wide range of clouds, tools, vendors, and platforms.

Expedient's clients were looking to move numerous applications into a cloud operating model, which includes a mix of applications and assets they own on premises, in a hosting data center, or in a hyperscale cloud. However, figuring out the optimal placement of workloads from their current environment to the right mix of cloud operating model was a complex challenge. Many clients were only 30 percent of the way to that destination due to reasons such as not knowing how many of their applications would fit a hyperscale cloud model and not envisioning other ways to reach their objectives. Expedient needed a common control plane that could unlock and provide access to client compute resources while also giving Expedient tools to improve service delivery. The main problems that needed addressing were making it easier for clients to provision into multiple clouds without adding complexity, providing insight into costs to ensure clients were getting the best value for their dollar, and being able to provide governance and insight into security across clouds.

Ficolo, a data center and cloud delivery company, was facing competitive pressure to transform itself into a cloud player. The company wanted to offer wholesale hybrid cloud services to its customers, rather than simply providing commodity public cloud services. However, Ficolo was challenged to find the right approach to management and automation. The goal was to provide a semi-public shared cloud solution to multiple private cloud customers who were also using public cloud. At the same time, the team also saw the chance to help software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers develop and host their applications. For these customers, Ficolo had to not only provide multi-cloud management, it also needed a highly automated provisioning engine to improve the velocity of client software releases.

American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) faced major business and technology challenges in 2020. The first major area of focus was the speed and efficiency of automated infrastructure deployment in disaster recovery scenarios. The company had an established relationship with a third-party systems integrator that had a large team in place to manually test and execute disaster recovery, including provisioning applications and infrastructure. GBT decided to overhaul this approach to create a more time-efficient and cost-effective way to execute hot/cold site-level rebuilds. The success of the initial engagement with Morpheus spurred an interest in leveraging the platform to assist in datacenter consolidation and public-cloud adoption. This new project came with its own set of familiar requirements. It needed to be cost-efficient with a rapid time to market.

Exponential-e’s development teams were constantly on the lookout for solutions that could help their clients maximize their IT infrastructures, while at the same time, help Exponential-e differentiate itself from the competition. They uncovered three fundamental pain points surrounding cloud adoption: Data management remains a costly and increasingly sophisticated challenge for most organizations. Even with cloud data replication services, users are frustrated with their inability to allocate resources where and when they need them most. Most clients use more than one cloud service provider. However, the more providers they add to their hybrid environments, the harder it is to ensure data transparency and visibility across an entire business landscape. Plus, more cloud providers mean less client control. Cloud expansion internationally – in a ubiquitous manner - is nearly impossible. Instead of finding a cloud service provider with an equally strong presence in every region of the world, companies are instead realizing that both the large hyper-scalers and the regional providers offer only pockets of geographical domination.