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. 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.
What it is for
Estates with more than one target platform and more than one team asking for things. Without Morpheus, the same request takes different routes there and follows 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. Those processes should therefore be settled before it is rolled out.

