Elastic’s Open Source Strategy Drives Innovation and Expansion – Partner Content

Indeed, at the recent ElasticON conference in Sydney, the company doubled down on this commitment, championing open source as an opportunity to fuel innovation across its search, security, and observability platforms.

Speaking with iTnews at the event, Chief Product Officer Ken Exner outlined the strategic advantages open source has provided that have become fundamental to the company’s identity and success.

“Open source is important for a few reasons,” Exner explained. “It’s a really efficient way to get your solutions out there and visible. You can spend lots of money on marketing, but if you have a good product, you can use open source as a way to get broad distribution and awareness.”

The 13-year-old company, which started with Elasticsearch and later incorporated Kibana and Logstash, has maintained its open-source philosophy throughout its history despite brief licensing changes. Recently, the company returned to triple licensing its software, including adding an AGPL license, effectively reinforcing its open-source roots.

Exner emphasized that open source creates a community around their platform, allowing customers and developers to extend and customise Elastic’s products. ‘You can’t go to other vendors and say, “How do I contribute extensions?” It’s not an option. You can’t actually see the source code.’

Thanks to this extensibility, Elastic’s products can be highly tailored to the individual needs of the company. “We have seen Elastic’s solutions being used in various industries – major banks combining business data with operational data to understand the financial impact of technical issues, automotive manufacturers monitoring assembly lines, and various healthcare equipment applications,” Exner said.

This adaptability is especially relevant in the AI-driven landscape, where developers increasingly seek flexible, open-source tools.

Elastic is uniquely positioned to support the rapid evolution of AI-driven work, where adaptability is essential. Exner noted that Elastic solutions are ideal to support the resurgence of laptop-based development. “People want to develop locally, and when they’re ready to push, they’ll move to a cloud-based service. When that happens, it helps to have a strong open-source story because developers want to be able to grab something open source, put it on their laptop and begin work,” he said.

Looking ahead, Elastic plans to expand its capabilities for its Search AI platform in three key areas. The company will continue adding core capabilities like query rewriting models while creating higher-level abstractions that make implementation easier.

“Developers like easy to use,” Exner emphasized. “People like being able to be productive. They like being able to get going fast. They love being able to have a prototype in minutes as opposed to a week.”

What sets Elastic apart, according to Exner, is the balance between simplicity and power. “The problem with most technologies that focus on simplicity is that simplicity is as far as it goes,” he said. “That’s great as long as that’s all you need, but often people hit a wall where the product can’t do something, and then they’re stuck.”

With Elastic’s layered approach, Exner explains, “A customer gets that sugar rush of getting to a successful implementation very quickly. But then, if they need to customise and do something, they can always drop down and do it.”

In observability, Elastic is focusing on open telemetry, even contributing proprietary technology it acquired to the open-source project. “We want to commoditise collection,” Exner explained. “If we can do that as an industry, it gives people better data portability. What matters then is your experience with the data store, the analytics, and AI. These are areas where we know we win.”

For security, Elastic continues to leverage AI to transform the experience. “We began with logs for security,” Exner said. “Now we leverage a ton of AI to optimise the experience there, and we will continue being leaders in using AI to transform the security space.”

As enterprises increasingly embrace AI-driven solutions, Elastic sees the distinction between open and closed platforms as more critical than ever. Open source isn’t merely a distribution model for Elastic, but rather it’s a philosophy to democratise innovation while also addressing the more pragmatic and growing concerns many businesses have of vendor lock-in.