Why Elastic sees huge opportunities in Asia

“Our goal is to make APAC the fastest growing region for Elastic globally,” says Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan at Elastic.

Elastic recently announced a total revenue of US$450 million during the vendor's financial results for its third quarter of fiscal 2026. Not on did this represent an 18% increase year on year; it also indicates that the Search AI company is on the right path to growth and success.

The Asia Pacific region in particular continues to provide huge opportunities for the vendor. CRN Asia recently spoke to Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan at Elastic to understand about the opportunities the vendor is seeing in the region as well as how its dealing with its customers.

“The expectation is simple. APAC has to be the growth engine for the organization. And that's the expectation our CEO has from us, and I will say that's a mandate that I have signed up for in my new capacity in this role and that's what we are building for. Our goal is to make APAC the fastest growing region for Elastic globally,” Deshmukh said.

Deshmukh explained the reason for this is because many countries in the region are still emerging in their tech adoption, which is leading to a lot of demand for Elastic’s services.

“We have not reached a stage of maturity or saturation which some countries probably have because of the adoption, but we are still at an early stage and that's why we are still in the high growth phase. So, the expectation is clear, APAC is relatively an emerging market, and there is a massive demand here. Whether it is from the percentage of employees, people who live in Asia or the economies, we contribute to the global GDP. APAC has massive demand and that’s why the company is expecting us to be the fastest growing region within Elastic,” he said.

What follows is the rest of the conversation with Deskmukh at Elastic {ON} Singapore recently.

While Elastic is seeing opportunities in APAC, are you also seeing increasing discussions on AI ROI and how are you addressing this?

Fortunately for us, we are in a great position on both these areas. We are one of the very unique companies who offers customer choice for three types of deployment. We have a fully managed cloud service like a fully managed SaaS service. A lot of customers are choosing that for certain use cases and particularly those who don't want to manage the underlying infrastructure; they are ready to consume, they are choosing that service. We call that serverless from a technology standpoint.

Secondly, we have an Elastic cloud hosted service which is available on all clouds across all the regions in APAC. A lot of customers prefer that today or rather from the past. The reason large customers have shown preference towards that is because it gives them an ability to fine tune and optimize the Elastic service for their needs. In a fully managed service, you are a consumer, you just basically sign up and start consuming it. In an ECH, it's a pass. So, you have the ability to fine tune the underlying infrastructure for your specific use cases.

The third option that we offer is self-managed, which means you can take your own data center, whatever your server, whatever your infrastructure is and run Elastic on top of that. So, we are in a unique position where we are able to address the data solidity requirements. For some customers, we are able to meet the data solidity requirements by saying that you are consuming Elastic that is running in your country.

For example, in Singapore, we have Elastic running on all the three hyperscalers and we have both serverless as well as the Elastic cloud hosted. So that gives us an ability to demonstrate that the data and the service is running locally in that country. For government customers, defense and other secret services customers, we are able to offer the self-managed service which means we are running in their data center. So, nothing leaves their premises at all. I would say we are in a very good position to meet the data solidity requirements of customers.

On the ROI, once again, Asia, while economies are bigger, but the per capita is very low and because the per capita is low, you need to be very conscious about it. For example, a bank in Asia will not invest the same technology dollars with a bank in the UK or US for that matter. So again, we are in a unique position to meet that expectation because if you talk to many of our customers, while we offer a lot of value in terms of innovation, you will see that many customers will acknowledge the cost of running the service in Elastic is the lowest. And the reason it is lowest is one is because of the deployment of choice and because of all the innovation that we have done.

Can you share a bit more about the growth and success in the different markets in APAC?

In India, there are three dimensions for us. First, India is a market where the customers need our technology. That is a big market from the size of the economy. So, there are a lot of companies who are ready to make investments. We have customers in government, banking, telco, manufacturing, and startup. We are seeing a lot of demand, and we are being a technology provider to Indian companies.

We are working with a lot of partners from resellers to SIs to MSPs, including some of the telcos who have become our MSPs. A lot of the telcos on the B2B side, that's another thing that we are seeing, including in Singapore and other regions, where the telcos are becoming a B2B site, MSP providers for security particularly, and they're building the service on Elastic. So that's one dimension of India business.

The second dimension India is offering to us is very interesting. We can call them a partner and see the country as an ISV. These are companies who are building solutions for the global markets. The best example of that I can quote is a company like Freshworks. The company builds a service for the global market. That’s just one example, but there are hundreds of companies under there, different stages of funding and maturity, who are solving specific problems for customers, either in the area of recruitment, or some business processes, and they are using Elastic under the hood.

That is emerging as a very interesting sector for us, because some of these are companies who have built service and offer to global customers. So, they have become very critical for us. This is very unique to India, because of the software talent and everything that exists.

The third dimension India has the GCC dimension, because of the global customers who have large competency centers. We did a gathering recently in Bangalore for our GCC customers, we met with some of our large global customers. And we have seen that now, the people who are in these GCC centers, they are actually playing a very critical role in influencing and on the technology.

This means that these centers are not just for knowledge workers, but are centers of excellences, and they're getting involved in decision making on the technology side, influencing the use cases. So that has increased now our engagement with some of our global customers who have presence in India. So, these are the three unique dimensions that India as a market offers to us, right.

In many markets, we only have one dimension, which is, we try to serve the customers with our technology. But India has these two other unique dimensions of ISVs and global competency centers.

What about Australia?

In Australia, I would say the market maturity wise is the most matured market. The first reason is, with Australia and New Zealand both put together, they mandated the use of cloud almost 12 years ago to 13 years ago or more, and the reason for that is lack of skills.

Both Australia and New Zealand realized that they don't necessarily have the skills, so they have to automate a lot of stuff. So, they can't have hundreds of infrastructure or network engineers and managing their own private clouds and data center.

They decided to move to cloud way earlier than any other market. As a result of that, we are seeing the level of maturity that many Australian customers have is the same as what we see in many of the developed markets primarily because of the lack of skills and the emphasis on automation and stuff. And that is also putting them at the forefront for adapting to some of the cutting-edge technology that we have.

So, Australia is an important market, it's a very matured market, and as I said, because of the skills shortage that they have, they tend to invest a lot in advanced technologies and automation and leverage cloud and AI and all of that.

What are you hoping to achieve most this year in the region?

So, the segments of the ISVs and the GCC, if we do that well, it has an impact on our global business. If we successfully build the ISVs, which serve global markets, it has a potential to impact all our global business. If at all we do great work with the GCCs in the region here, it has again an ability to impact our global business.

Our primary focus is APAC and APAC growth. But we do believe that through ISVs and GCCs, we can make a much bigger impact for Elastic as an organization globally. So that is something we are trying to work through. The last thing I will say is that whenever global customers global leaders have come here, we get them to meet with a lot of our customers.

They are taking back a lot of use cases and ideas that our customers are implementing. So I would say in some ways, it is now becoming two-way traffic with APAC taking the lead.