Elastic rooting for a strong partner ecosystem for its next phase of growth

Andrew Habgood, Vice President, Partner Ecosystem, APJ – Elastic, in a chat with VARINDIA shares what it takes to become a partner for Elastic, while giving a clear idea of its partner structure and the policies that guide the company’s association with the channel community -
 

Can you shed some light on your go to market strategy for the India market in particular, and the APAC market in general?
Our market strategy is pretty clear, we are going to grow with and through partners. Elastic has grown and made a very successful company - its history, largely driven by a culture of community, based on our open source and working with customers who just demand the software. We are pretty sure that for the next phase of our growth, we are building the right ecosystem, putting the ecosystem in place and supporting that ecosystem to really support and scale and multiply our growth. We plan to continue to do this, and we are going to work with partners to support them in doing business and reach out to the customers directly with our technology and solutions.

How important is the partner for Elastic?
A partner is very essential for our business. While we can go by ourselves and cover a few accounts and experience some linear growth by doubling and tripling the number of account managers, but to reach the thousands and thousands of customers, we need to have an ecosystem. It is particularly important for markets like India, where we depend on strong partnerships, as we cannot do justice to these markets with just our own sales teams. Herein comes the partner program to outline the kind of incentives, initiatives and support we have put in place to make our partners more profitable.

We have a standard three tier partner structure - Select, Premier and Elite. We have a lot of features that have not always been available within other vendors programs. We are evolving our deal registration which tends to be a unique opportunity.  

Elastic follows the two-tier approach, which includes the distributors and partners. With the distributors, we are trying to make sure that the distributors we choose are aligning to the cloud marketplaces, which in turn can support the partners going forward. Very soon we will be implementing some distribution partnerships across every country in Asia Pacific. We are trying to pick the right distributors that can help us enable the right partners for building the ecosystem, in terms of scale, management etc. 

Lastly, we have a long-standing managed service provider program, particularly for managed security. Additionally, a couple of months ago, we launched the Elastic Verified Status, where we put in place a designated badge for partners that help them to go to market and are able to deliver services.  

How do you measure the success of your programs or the channel strategies that you designed for the partners? 
It is important for us to get feedback. During our ElasticON event, we hear from the executives from the partner companies, both in one on one meetings and the forums, where partners together can exchange ideas on what is working with the commonalities and what is not. We are in the process of doing a global partner survey rolled out and are looking at instituting a more formal partner NPS. 

When we talk about measuring success, the continued growth of the partner company is important as by enabling and activating them, we want to see more partners joining the space. At the same time, we look at the new opportunities that partners are creating, and how they are able to unlock different doors in different business units. We are also looking at the capabilities in the market, measuring those accreditations and certifications and solutions that are being offered including the general fundamentals. We want to accelerate our growth, track those levers of how we are growing in new areas, and how the partners are contributing to that.
 

Talking about the Indian market, any key customer verticals that you are looking at?
In India, we have managed to succeed and have case studies in practically every industry, because our technology and our foundation as a search analytics company means that we are applicable in many use cases. The personas of our deployment as one platform, deployed as a security, deployed as an observability offering, deployed as a search offering means that we fit everywhere. Financial services is an extremely strong market for us, while telecommunications and public sector are becoming very important.  We also certainly see a lot of enterprise customers and retail gaining traction. 

Any message you would like to give to our partners?
Come and join Elastic. We are a search analytics company, and have a proposition that is quite unique; we are not siloed. We have clear use cases and partners who want to innovate can come and work with us.  We are going to do great things together. Any innovative partners that want to come and join Elastic, we are looking forward to collaborating with you.