The Platform Cycle Has Turned. Here’s How Partners Win It.

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Over the past four years at Elastic, I've worked closely with customers, partners, and field teams across sales, enablement, renewals, and value engineering. One thing has become increasingly clear: Partners have never been more important in helping customers navigate change.

That's one reason I'm excited to take on an expanded role leading the Global Partner Sales team alongside Strategy, Enablement, Sales Programs, and Renewals. It's also why I wanted to share a few observations about what I'm seeing in the market and where I believe the opportunity is for our partner ecosystem.

AI is driving a buying cycle reset

For most of the decade, enterprises assembled stacks of specialized tools across observability, security, search, and logging. The integrations were messy, costs added up, and the overhead grew. AI has made all of that harder to justify. As AI infrastructure costs rise, complexity is the first thing that gets cut.

As a result, customers are consolidating around platforms that deliver more outcomes on fewer contracts. And they’re making larger, longer commitments to the vendors they choose. That shift creates a significant opportunity for Elastic and an equally significant opportunity for the partners who move early.

My time at Elastic has given me a front-row seat to how customers buy and where partners create impact. These lessons reinforce principles instilled in me as a Ranger in the US Army: disciplined execution, a clear-eyed read of changing situations, and alignment toward a common goal. Meeting this moment requires all three. The platforms that win will combine technical depth, strong ecosystem relationships, and the partner infrastructure to scale.

Why Elastic is the right platform for this moment

The Elasticsearch Platform sits at the intersection of today’s largest enterprise priorities: AI-powered search, unified observability, and modern security operations — all on a single data layer. Customers running Elastic for log analytics find they can consolidate their SIEM. Those using Elasticsearch for enterprise search discover it’s also the right infrastructure for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and AI agents. The platform naturally expands within accounts, giving partners a compounding services opportunity that point solution vendors can’t replicate.

The infrastructure ecosystem has taken notice. In August 2025, Dell, NVIDIA, and Elastic announced a joint integration within the Dell AI Data Platform with Elasticsearch serving as the Data Search Engine for vector search and retrieval at enterprise scale. The combination of Dell’s AI infrastructure, NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated software, and Elastic’s search capabilities represents a production-ready stack for enterprise AI that customers can deploy today. It’s a meaningful signal about where Elastic sits in the AI infrastructure hierarchy.

Our relationships with the hyperscalers reinforce that position. Elastic is available natively on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and we’re expanding co-sell activity across all three. These aren’t passive listings. They’re active go-to-market relationships with the platforms that enterprise customers trust for their core infrastructure decisions. For partners, that creates multiple entry points and co-sell angles in accounts you’re already working.

What I’ve learned from partnerships

I've spent considerable time speaking with our partner community. What I've consistently heard is that partners want three things: clarity, alignment, and opportunity.

Partners are looking for closer alignment between our sales team and how partner GTM is supported, and I agree. We’ve made progress, and there’s still work to do. Deals can get complex fast, and partner investment needs to translate to proportional results.

Bringing Global Partner Sales and Field Strategy and Enablement under one leadership team reflects that feedback. The goal is straightforward: Every investment a partner makes in Elastic should produce a predictable, visible return in deal support, field alignment, and enablement that tracks to what’s moving in the market. I’ve run these functions separately. Bringing them together means one team is accountable for the full partner experience from the _first_ deal to the _hundredth_.

Now is the time to build

Platform cycles reward early movers, and we’re already seeing it. Partners who built Elastic practices in 2024 are generating exponentially more bookings this year. That momentum carries into services, where we see a 3x–5x multiplier on partner-attached software in our data. And Elastic’s expansion into AI agents and agentic workflows will extend it even further. As customers consolidate platforms and operationalize AI, they're turning to partners with proven Elastic expertise.

This is why we continue to invest in our partner program with expanded, free on-demand training, the same tools our sales teams use, and a leadership team directly accountable for partner outcomes across the full lifecycle.

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