Multicloud orchestrator Morpheus Data added integrations with Alibaba Cloud, as well as network automation and software-defined networking (SDN) support for Cisco ACI to its platform.

The company already provided this level of integration with Cisco UCS for composing bare metal servers.

The platform’s latest updates also include new support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud, and Openstack and Microsoft Hyper-V networking improvements including multi-network, static IP, and IP pool support.

Adding Alibaba Cloud support came in response to a request from Chinese service provider customer Beijing Internet Harbor, said Brad Parks, VP of marketing and business development at Morpheus. And, he added, “we’ve seen Alibaba pop up in India, the U.S., as well, especially among global companies” as the cloud provider expands its reach beyond China.

Meanwhile Morpheus, which spun out of San Mateo, California-based private equity firm Bertram Capital in 2014, has been expanding its reach with marquee customers including McDonald’s, BlackRock, HSBC, Spireon, AstraZeneca, Arris, and Quicken Loans.

“Morpheus got its start as a tool designed and built by DevOps guys to get their jobs done,” Parks said. “They looked at Cloud Foundry, some of the VMware suite, other automation tools and didn’t find what they needed. And now we are helping large enterprises enable self-service deployment of application stacks across any physical infrastructure they may have on premises, or a multitude of public clouds.”

The company’s software lets companies manage and deploy applications across just about any cloud or on bare metal servers though dozens of integrations. These include public clouds —AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google Cloud Platform, and DigitalOcean, to name a few — as well as VMware, Openstack, Hyper-V, Azure Stack, Nutanix, and Oracle-based private clouds.

Morpheus can also integrate with automation platforms like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, as well as load balancers, storage and backup providers, and Kubernetes and Docker containers.

“As we’ve engaged with those large enterprises, the reason we end up first coming to their attention and then getting to the short list and then ultimately wining those deals does come from the breadth of functionality of the platform and the third-party integrations,” Parks said.

The platform’s core use case is self-service provisioning. Development teams want to speed up code deployments and IT teams often can’t keep up with the requests. And with multicloud hybrid IT environments, companies often don’t even know how many virtual machines (VM) they are using or what their actual capacity needs are.

“We inventory all of the utilization, we take that data and run it through machine learning algorithms and propose to customers here are some opportunities to save money and rightsize your environments,” Parks said.

The platform also enables unified governance across clouds. “We insulate you from having to learn dozens of different cloud tools from different providers,” Parks said. Morpheus also integrates with cloud providers’ security tools.

“The third key pillar is around automation,” Parks said. Morpheus integrations allow DevOps teams to deploy applications in minutes. “We held these large enterprises take advantage of things like Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, VMware, we can be an orchestrator of orchestrators,” Parks said. “AstraZeneca is a great example. They went from 80 hours literally down to minutes.”

Because the platform is infrastructure agnostic, Morpheus is better able to compete against VMware and Red Hat, Parks said.

“Large, complicated enterprises have bare metal severs, a bunch of VMs, there’s probably a guy in the corner with a Kubernetes cluster, probably some people who tried Cloud Foundry once upon a time,” Parks explained. “They have a little bit of everything and they won’t want to learn and deploy on five different technology stacks for each incremental problem. Morpheus, because it’s not tied to any one vendor’s technology stack, has a better competitive position than something that’s coming from a VMware or HPE or Pivotal because we were designed from day one to be completely agnostic. We give teams the ability to unify all of those tools.”