Elastic’s channel ecosystem is a crucial enabler

For Ravi Rajendran, Area Vice President of ASEAN and Greater China at Elastic, the most important thing when dealing with partners is credibility.

As a Search AI company, Elastic continues to expand its presence in the region, supporting customers in their journey to transform data into answers, actions and outcomes. With its Search AI Platform used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500companies, Elastic recorded a revenue of US$1.483 billion, an increase of 17% year-over-year, for its full fiscal year.

Elastic was also recently recognized as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms by Gartner for its offering, Elastic Observability. The evaluation was based on specific criteria that analyzed the company’s overall Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

The Search AI company also announced a new five-year strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The collaboration represents both organizations' commitment to help accelerate the transition to AI-native enterprises through joint product integrations and go-to-market (GTM) initiatives that help customers build generative AI-based applications faster while reducing complexity.

Growth with the channel

In Southeast Asia, Elastic’s presence grows as businesses continue to focus on getting the most out of their data. According to Ravi Rajendran, Area Vice President of ASEAN and Greater China, search has become a very important thing in the world of observability.

Crucially enabling growth is Elastic’s channel ecosystem. Rajendran highlighted that Elastic currently has a distributor in each country it operates in. However, the key role that channel plays for Elastic is the system integration that it enables.

“The majority of channels back in time weren't there because Elastic started differently. But then, we went out to market and started selling our solutions to customers rather than using the open-source version. And we realized we needed a sales engine for that. So, we built a sales team, we built a technical team, and then we realize, compared to some of our competition, there are much bigger teams. We do need a channel ecosystem. And then we start to build on that ecosystem. And this has become a very important growth engine for us,” said Rajendran.

For Rajendran, customers in ASEAN and other parts of Asia like Hong Kong and Taiwan or even India, there is a strong need for an ecosystem play. He believes partners in the region have the expertise needed for a solution set.

“Some partners have a particular expertise where they do nothing but security. We’ve then got to mix and match and enable them to find our solution. One of the things we are offering now is free on-demand training globally for customers, prospects, partners, and even employees. We want the world to be enabled by this. In the past, we had to work hard to get our partners enabled. Right now, the partners are just happy that we are just offering this form of sincerity that we want them to be really, truly enabled on our technology plane,” explained Rajendran.

Rajendran also highlighted that the hyperscalers play an important role in their channel ecosystem. The engagement between Elastic’s sales team and hyperscalers enables a mutual benefit as customers appreciate the on-premises opportunity.

“We don't force the customer that you must be on-prem. We don't force the customer that you must be in the cloud. We don't do on-prem because most customers need a combination, hybrid or even a hybrid multi-cloud. What we just announced recently is a concept called serverless, which is another focus area for us to go to market where we take the whole management out of the customer, managing it on the cloud, and we do it behind the scenes. A lot of engineering work went into this to make it as simplified as we can for our customers so that they don't have to focus on the operational style of managing an Elastic play to take care of their own operations,” explained Rajendran.

As such, for Rajendran, the most important thing when dealing with partners is credibility.

“If we're working with someone, we've got to try to win and lose with someone, right? Play with different partners. That credibility is crucial for me,” he concluded.