What it is
Morpheus puts an ordering and management layer over the platforms already in place. vSphere, a hyperscaler and Kubernetes appear in the same catalogue. What a team may order, how it gets named and what it costs are defined once.
It installs on Linux, on-premises or in a public cloud, and it reaches the systems around it through integrations rather than through code: load balancers, backup, DNS and IPAM, ITSM, and the DevOps tools a team already runs, Ansible, Terraform, Puppet and Jenkins among them. Scripts that exist keep working, from disk or from a Git repository.
What changed
Morpheus was an independent company. HPE acquired Morpheus Data, and the product is HPE Morpheus Software now. That is not only a badge: it sits at the top of an HPE software family, with Morpheus VM Essentials underneath it as the virtualization tier, and HPE licenses both per socket rather than per core.
Per socket is the part worth reading twice if you are costing a way out of a per-core licence.
What it is for
Estates with more than one target platform and more than one team asking for things. That is exactly where the effort it removes comes from: same request, different routes, no shared rule.
With one platform and one team, rolling it out does not pay for itself.
What to watch
An automation layer encodes the processes you have. Where no rule exists, it makes the absence visible, and that is the uncomfortable part of any rollout. Those decisions belong to the operating model, not to the product.