Elastic: For - You Know, More Than Search
When Shay, Uri, Simon and I founded Elasticsearch in 2012, we always knew we were signing up to provide more than "just search" to the market. That it was going to be successful at this scale, we could have never dreamt up.
Three years, five more products, 20 million downloads, 170 employees, and over 17,000 Meetup members later, the future is looking very bright. If I just look at the lineup of customers and users we have at our first user conference, Elastic{ON}, I feel humbled. There's the Yale Department of Laboratory Medicine talking about how they use Elasticsearch to identify causes and potential cures for cancer, the U.S. Geological Survey uses the ELK Stack to supplement their seismographic data with social media data in order to better assess and react to earthquakes, FICO will show how it uses Elasticsearch to calculate more accurate credit scores, and we've even entered the final frontier, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab taking the mainstage on Wednesday morning to tell us how Elasticsearch monitors metrics from the Mars Curiosity rover.
All of us at Elasticsearch are blown away each and every day with how developers around the world are putting our products to use. Today, we're about much more than just search. We're obsessed with data, and getting insights out of it. We want our users to query their data, drive analytics and make correlations that couldn't be extracted before, and we've built our products to easily scale along as your data volume grows. We believe we have put a suite of products in place that allows users to extract insights out of their data, that they weren't able to extract before. That alone is more rewarding to us, that many of you will ever know.
Mostly driven by the fact that we are now servicing so many more use cases that span way beyond search, we have felt an increasing urge for some time now to rethink our company brand. Elasticsearch is, and will continue to be, the core engine of our product stack, but the company is building and maintaining a suite of solutions that deliver additional functionality beyond Elasticsearch. Because of this, we believe it is time to embrace a new company brand that's as versatile as our products.
And on that note, I am extremely excited to be able to introduce you to our very new brand:
As a growing number of people, including myself, have been referring to us as "Elastic" since the inception of the company anyway, we believe this is actually a very fitting brand name for our us.
But there's more.
As users have become more familiar with the versatility of the ELK stack, we have seen many organizations deploy multiple ELK clusters supporting as many different use cases. Whereas this is a wonderful evolutionary process, it does create challenges we haven't experienced before. We always felt that there was a good chance that this would happen – one company running many ELK clusters – and have therefore always envisioned ourselves creating a revolutionary product in the form of a centralized management infrastructure. An infrastructural layer with the objective to put operations people in control of their ELK landscape across their business.
In order to accelerate this next phase of our company beyond search, we've also announced today that we acquired Elasticsearch SaaS provider Found (https://found.no/), whose technology will make it possible to manage multiple clusters: through the SaaS solution, and in the near future, also on premise. Shay gives more details around our teams joining forces in his blog post.
I'd like to personally thank everyone that's been with us on our journey so far. It's been quite a ride, and it's far from over. For those that want to join us on our adventure, follow us on our new Twitter handle @elastic and our brand new website elastic.co – we've got a lot more exciting things in store for 2015 and beyond!