MSPs driving Elastic’s growth in APAC

“What we're trying to do is make sure that we have a program and structure that supports all those different partner types and more,” says Andrew Habgood, Vice President, Global Partner Sales, International at Elastic.

For Andrew Habgood, Vice President, Global Partner Sales, International at Elastic, the wide diversity of markets across Asia Pacific has varying impacts by country. The public sector remains a consistently strong area for Elastic, which is supported by unique partnerships that are delivering tangible outcomes.

In a conversation with CRN Asia, Habgood shared that across the industry, observability and security continue to see significant growth, underpinned by AI capabilities that make it easier for operators and analysts to deploy, scale, and extract value from data more quickly and effectively.

He explained that these trends create major opportunities for partners, particularly as many customers lack the skills to manage security operations or complex data environments in-house. This has also led to an increasing demand for managed security providers who play a key role in delivering SIEM and SOC services, as observability and AI require diverse partner skill sets, from advisory to integration.

At the same time, as AI use cases mature, such as agent-based tools that allow customers to take ownership of their data, Habgood believes that partners are best positioned to help identify use cases, connect systems, and deploy solutions. This drives the need for partner programs that support a wide range of capabilities and business models.

“What we're trying to do is make sure that we have a program and structure that supports all those different partner types and more,” Habgood said.

Leading this in APAC is Sarah Croft, Partner Director for APAC at Elastic. Croft ensures that Elastic’s partner managers and partner solution architects in the region are driving and growing the vendor in the future.

“When we look at the partner types we have, we put in place a year or so ago a distribution network in the Asia Pacific markets. It gives additional skills in each market to support partners on their journey. It helps with many things such as currency, compliance, credit, and all those other usual things. So that's a foundation element supporting all of our partner types,” Habgood explained.

He also mentioned that Elastic is focusing on the progressive change for its partner program which will focus on four pillars – sell, service, manage, and build. While Elastic has done this in the past, Habgood stated that it was all done in a siloed approach.

“We've had a resale program and contract for transactions. We've worked with systems integration partners, but we've not really recognized them or incentivized them in a particular way. We've had managed service providers on separate contracts that look very different and don't have any combined recognition. And we've had OEM ISVs developed on our stack in a separate silo. So, what we're going to aim to do is have an umbrella program that recognizes and incentivizes depending on how they work with us,” said Habgood.

For example, if it’s a resale partner, they will be given the natural incentives and the natural recognition of tiers as well as the natural protections of things like deal registration. If it’s a services partner, Elastic is going to help them build the depth of professional services capability and give them the skills to go and deliver complex projects.

“Often times, it's hard to recognize a partner and provide external recognition or incentives of someone who doesn't sell your stuff. So, we want to make sure that we are helping them prepare and then obviously incentivizing them, recognizing them, publicly making it known who they are and why they're important. Because for us, a successful customer is one that's had either a partner or Elastic services or a combination of both, helping them ensure their deployments are successful, helping them adopt our solutions, keeping up with the technology and so on,” he added.

The role of managed service providers

When it comes to MSPs, Elastic has got a few unique MSPs it works with in the region. Apart from MSSPs, Habgood shared that Elastic also works with managed observability providers as well as a few unique ones who provide managed OT environments.

“We're going to put a continued focus on making sure that we're helping them go to market. In the past, we probably treated MSPs more as customers, as a company. When we look at our customer coverage, our largest customers are capable of building a SOC. They're capable of operating an observability platform. But even our largest customers often still say it's not our core business and ask for help. But if we move down the pyramid, that's when they're drowning in data. The volume of data has increased. The complexity of finding a thread across that data has increased. So, we're still hearing that same demand from customers. So now we are simplifying that for customers with attack detection and other capabilities we're building on the platform. But they're still complex,” explained Habgood.

This is where Elastic is seeing a lot of success and growth traction for MSPs for that part of the market, especially since they can take that on for customer delivery. Habgood also mentioned that the feedback from MSSPs is that a lot of them want to play the neutrality card, the advisor card and so on.

“But even those are still telling us, you're easier to onboard. We're getting more out of you. You're bringing the AI functionality in for the analysts in ways that we haven't seen before. So even if they're neutral, they're still looking at doing 90% of their business with us. And we have a number that have wholeheartedly said, Elastic is going to be their platform,” he said.

The role of distributors

Habgood also highlighted that Elastic relies on its distributors to help onboard and manage its MSPs, especially the longer tail.

“It's an interesting one because when you talk to a distribution partner about proposition, no matter whether security is a focus or not, they've still probably got 500 security vendors because of the nature of the market whereby there are so many and there will always be. But we did try and find ones that had a strong alignment to what we do across the portfolio, how they can provide value-added and extra services to partners in the market,” he explained.

Habgood also pointed out that Elastic was able to build its distribution program from the ground up. In the past, the vendor did not have distribution in Asia and had to build it right away.

“We obviously have a very predictable margin structure for distributors to be profitable. In most markets, we've only appointed one. It's not an exclusive arrangement, but it is a sole appointment because we want to make sure there's no unnatural competition as we grow the track. There are certain markets, especially the bigger markets like India, where we have appointed a second distributor, but that's due to the size and complexity of the markets. We also have performance programs with them. So, we measure those and have quarterly business plans, objectives and so on to make sure that the things that we agreed to do together, we're doing together. And that's been a very effective model. And I think our partnerships with the distributors here have been quite good,” he said.

Looking ahead, Habgood believes the goal is all about adding incredible value to the features and functions the vendor is building to its enterprise offering. For Habgood, it's about unlocking the goals together and getting a partner ecosystem that really takes Elastic to accelerated growth.

“The ability to accelerate the company's growth is what I'm excited about. We are building a foundation for the next phase of our growth with and through partners. And I'm excited that we've been able to put a lot of that in place in the last couple of years, and we've got a good foundation that's going to let us do that more in the future,” he concluded.