Elastic and Microsoft in 2024: Celebrating innovation and partnership at Ignite

Last month, Elastic was thrilled to participate in Microsoft Ignite to showcase our latest advancements and integrations with Microsoft in service of our joint customers. Ignite is Microsoft's largest annual conference. Attracting more than 200,000 people online and 14,000 in-person attendees, this event allowed us to closely engage with customers and the vast Microsoft partner ecosystem in a meaningful way. As Microsoft’s US Partner of the Year, it was the perfect opportunity to celebrate the culmination of our joint investment, innovation, and co-engineering with Microsoft and how our partnership helps customers develop and scale their generative AI (GenAI) capabilities.

This blog highlights our top moments at Microsoft Ignite and our collaboration with Microsoft to better serve customers in 2024.

Announcements

• Azure solution certification: A new benchmark for quality and integration

The most recent landmark achievement in our collaboration is our recent Azure solution certification. This certification underscores our commitment to providing trusted, high-quality solutions that integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Azure. With this certification, customers can be confident in deploying Elastic solutions within their Microsoft Azure environments knowing that they meet high security, reliability, and performance standards.

• Serve more with Serverless: Elastic Cloud Serverless coming soon on Microsoft Azure

We’re excited to share that Elastic Cloud Serverless will soon be available on Microsoft Azure! This new offering provides all the power of Elastic’s solutions in a fully managed, serverless experience. Built on a new Search AI Lake architecture, it combines vast storage and low latency querying at scale with all of the strengths of Elasticsearch’s AI and search capabilities.

• Announcing the Microsoft Semantic Kernel Elasticsearch connector

We announced the integration of Microsoft Semantic Kernel with Elasticsearch to enhance capabilities in building intelligent applications that use advanced semantic search and AI functionalities. This collaboration aims to simplify the development of sophisticated AI solutions, allowing users to handle and analyze complex data sets efficiently.

• 0 to 60 with Elastic AI Assistant for Search and Azure OpenAI

We also introduced the Elastic AI Assistant for Search, which integrates Azure OpenAI Service to enhance search experiences with natural language processing and AI-powered insights. This integration enables users to interact more naturally with their data and derive actionable intelligence from vast data sets, improving decision-making and operational efficiency.

Breakout sessions

• Revolutionize conversational AI demonstrated Elasticsearch integrations with Azure OpenAI Service to enhance conversational AI by providing large language models (LLMs) with contextual business data, resulting in richer and more relevant user interactions.

• Explore GenAI for customer support with Elastic Support Assistant showcased how Elastic is using Azure OpenAI to provide a generative AI-powered chat experience designed to answer a wide range of product questions across all Elastic products to enhance the customer experience.

• Elastic joined Microsoft in the session Transforming Co-Selling with Microsoft: A New Era of Collaboration, which focused on helping partners understand how enhancing collaboration and optimizing joint efforts with Microsoft can drive customer success.

• Elastic co-presented with Microsoft for a session on Productive AI with Semantic Kernel, demonstrating how .NET developers can use the Elasticsearch vector database in their applications.

Microsoft US Partner of the Year: A testament to our synergy
In a testament to our deep collaboration and commitment to customer success, Elastic was honored with the Microsoft US Partner of the Year award. The US Partner of the Year award recognized Elastic for delivering impactful solutions and services on Microsoft Azure, offering experiences powered by the Elastic Search AI Platform to our shared customers and accelerating business value through Microsoft Azure. As we reflect on this accomplishment, we remain dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what our technologies can achieve together.

Key announcements from Elastic and Microsoft in 2024

• Open inference API enhancements: Expanded API functionality with support for:

  • Azure AI Studio: Easier AI project setup and management

  • Chat completions: Build conversational AI solutions seamlessly

  • Embeddings: Improved data representation for AI models

• LLM observability for Azure OpenAI: Introduced new observability tools tailored for large language models on Azure.

• Azure OpenAI connector configuration: Makes it simpler to integrate Elasticsearch with Azure OpenAI and streamlines workflows for developers.

• Elasticsearch as a vector database within Microsoft solutions

  • Private preview of Elasticsearch as a vector database: Empowers developers to build AI solutions on their data for Azure OpenAI Studio.

  • GitHub Copilot integration: Improves debugging and performance monitoring for developers with demonstrated ability to bring observability insights from the Elastic AI Assistant into GitHub Copilot.

  • M365 Copilot: Showcased how M365 Copilot can be extended to bring observability insights from Elastic's AI Assistant into the M365 experience.

Key joint events

• We held nine community-focused meetups to help users understand key use cases.

• In addition to Microsoft Ignite and Microsoft Build, we collaborated on several conferences and events around the world: 

  • Microsoft Envision Hong Kong

  • Microsoft AI Tour Paris 

  • Microsoft AI Create for ISVs

  • Microsoft AI ISV Conference 

  • ElasticONs (SFO, New York, Chicago)

• Elastic Chief Product Officer Ken Exner took the stage for a live interview to discuss how Elasticsearch is incorporated into the "On Your Data" feature within Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service and the benefits this brings to developers.

• Elastic teamed up with a customer, Stack Overflow, in a breakout session highlighting how Stack Overflow uses Elastic and Azure OpenAI for vector and semantic search capabilities, delivering a generative AI-powered experience to developers.

• Jeff Vestal, principal customer enterprise architect at Elastic, provided a compelling live, on-stage demo about Elastic Observability and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

• Elasticsearch delivers performance increase for users running the Elastic Search AI Platform on ARM-based architectures: Benchmarking in preview provides Elasticsearch up to 37% better performance on Azure Cobalt 100 ARM-based VMs.

• Elastic Cloud adds Elasticsearch vector database optimized profile to Microsoft Azure: A hardware profile optimized for applications that use Elasticsearch as a vector database to store dense or sparse embeddings for search and GenAI use cases powered by RAG.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.

In this blog post, we may have used or referred to third party generative AI tools, which are owned and operated by their respective owners. Elastic does not have any control over the third party tools and we have no responsibility or liability for their content, operation or use, nor for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of such tools. Please exercise caution when using AI tools with personal, sensitive or confidential information. Any data you submit may be used for AI training or other purposes. There is no guarantee that information you provide will be kept secure or confidential. You should familiarize yourself with the privacy practices and terms of use of any generative AI tools prior to use. 

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