Elastic Joins Azure Marketplace As It Strengthens Relationship With Microsoft

Elastic announced today that it was deepening its relationship with Microsoft by adding its open source and commercial products to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Elastic (which used to be known as ElasticSearch) has been working with Microsoft for some time. It runs search on MSN.com, is embedded in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and also built into the Azure framework.

With today’s announcement, Azure customers looking to add the range of Elastic products can do so from the marketplace. This would include ElasticSearch, the Marvel monitoring tool, the Kibana data visualization tool, the Shield data protection tool and others.

Whatever components Azure customers choose to use, including them in the marketplace should simplify integration and speed up deployment of Elastic products across Azure. The marketplace provides a way to preconfigure templates and add one-click installation.

While Microsoft and Elastic may seem like strange bedfellows, Elastic founder and CTO Shay Banon says today’s Microsoft is a very different company from even five years ago and that there is a greater willingness to work with open source companies like Elastic. “There is a new vibe in the air and a level of innovation I haven’t seen before,” he said.

Elastic is excited to be working with Microsoft because it will give the company much greater reach with Microsoft’s enterprise customer base, Banon explained. It doesn’t mean that Elastic isn’t working with other cloud providers, just making it easier for those using Azure to access Elastic’s tool set.

It’s been a busy year for Elastic. It had the name change in March. That same month, it bought Found, a company that helps it deliver ElasticSearch as a service. It also bought Packetbeat at the end of May and introduced a new product to provide real-time network packet analytics. In June, 2014 it announced a $70 million Series C round to help fund all of that growth they were experiencing.

The company has grown from under 100 employees since that funding round to over 300 today. It claims 40 million downloads across the stack, including open source and commercial components. Instead of offering an enterprise version alongside the free open source version as with many open source company business models, Elastic sells commercial extensions including the logging, security and analytics pieces. It also has subscriptions on the ElasticSearch as a service to generate additional revenue.

Elastic has a broad view of enterprise search. It’s not simply finding documents across an enterprise. It’s also about finding and visualizing data in new ways to make connections and solve problems like curing cancer or tracking data in the Mars Rover. “That vision that search can be used to solve different problems seems to resonate with our community and users,” Banon said.