Bringing customers the best Elastic experience on Alibaba Cloud

The partnership between Elastic and Alibaba Cloud has expanded our community of users and developers into thousands of commercial users. 

This partnership is a leading example of Elastic’s commitment to partnering with companies that users trust with their cloud infrastructure and developing a cloud-native, flexible platform. Other partners include Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS.

Now, we are thrilled to be the recipient of Alibaba Cloud’s Walking Together Award. Here, Pankaj Khushani, Sr. Director of Partners at Elastic, explains how Elastic and Alibaba Cloud have overcome market and global challenges to drive growth. 

What is unique about the partnership?

One of the most unique things about our partnership is that Alibaba Elasticsearch is one of Alibaba’s self-developed solutions, allowing customers to purchase and start using the product directly from the Alibaba Big Data product family. 

The second thing is that Elastic is highly focused on growing it's cloud business in China. 

Third, the way Alibaba Cloud has taken the service to market gives us a huge amount of scale that we otherwise would not have in China. 

How is this collaboration an example of Elastic’s commitment to partnerships? 

The biggest thing is the level of investment that is being made on both sides. Our teams were extremely transparent. The amount of effort and time which we’ve put into our partnership with Alibaba Cloud is immense. And Alibaba Cloud has reciprocated. 

In order to bring customers the best experience, we both agreed that it was important to include commercial features. Alibaba Cloud clearly understood the benefits of focusing on a commercial offering instead of an open source offering. 

The product and engineering teams at both companies are aligned. Alibaba Cloud has increased headcount across their support, product, and engineering teams, and are reaching into their community for applicants. 

“Alibaba Cloud is actively embracing technical partners like Elastic, exploring a replicable path in free and open source and cloud-native collaboration. We are working together to create a larger Alibaba Cloud business ecosystem that is more than a traditional peer-to-peer technology cooperation, making it easier to help companies achieve digital transformation.”
–Yangqing Jia, Vice President of Alibaba Group and Senior Fellow of the Computing Platform BU, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence

How has the Elastic community in China responded to this partnership?

To give some historical background, Elastic has had a large community in China. Alibaba Cloud had an extremely strong community as well. Alibaba Cloud has a massive draw and attracts a lot of developers, so when we came together we were able to tell our communities that they were getting a best-in-breed product and the largest, cutting-edge cloud provider. 

"What’s unique to the market in China is the engagement we have with participants in our events (virtual or physical). For example, in 2019, we had 7,000 developers in a joint activity. Moreover, open source users are turning to Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch Service because of the investment made by Alibaba Cloud to optimize the performance of Elasticsearch on their platform. It’s become a one-stop shop."
–Lancelot Guo, Vice President Sales Operation and Ecosystem, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence

What does the future look like for Elastic and Alibaba Cloud?

We’re doubling down on the shared reach, power, and innovation of cloud — and we’re on track to keep growing together with Alibaba Cloud. And we’ll continue to nourish our relationship between our communities. 

We’re being recognized as a top partner because of the sheer growth of the service. We’re getting more and more technical and go-to-market investment from Alibaba Cloud. The next few years are even more promising. Soon, other companies will be launching SasS offerings built on Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch Service.

Alibaba has a famous slogan: “Trust makes everything simple.” This can also describe our partnership and how it was started — with mutual trust from both sides and a vision for what the future holds.