Why I joined elasticsearch - July 17, 2014

Twelve years ago, as the dust from the dot-com implosion settled, I joined a one-product, one-hundred person startup that was on a mission to reinvent the enterprise software industry. We accomplished this by developing products that were easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy, community-driven, and engineered around a simple yet fundamental principle that had somehow been lost by traditional software vendors during the melee of the dot-com frenzy: vendor success is a derivative of customer success. Focus on the latter and the former will follow.

That company was salesforce.com and, after working there for more than a decade I have decided to close one incredible chapter and start the next. Here, at a glance, is why I joined Elasticsearch and why I believe it will emerge as the next great enterprise software company.

First and foremost, extracting business value from data will be the number one priority for enterprises across all industries within the next five years. Right now people talk about big data, analytics, predictive computing, artificial intelligence and many other data-focused disciplines. I predict that a term will emerge to capture this sector of the technology industry in the same way that “cloud computing” captured software-as-a-service, utility computing, file sharing, storage, web services, application hosting, etc. The seemingly endless use cases the Elasticsearch ELK stack addresses uniquely positions the company to help define this rapidly evolving category.

Secondly, open source is here to stay and, like social networking and mobility, still has so much room to mature and grow. The Elasticsearch ELK stack, and all of its core products - Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana - started independently as passion projects before a company was built around them. It is this evangelical, community-led approach to technology development that will write the future of enterprise software.

Thirdly, platforms that deliver insight from unprecedented volumes of data in milliseconds will dominate the space. They scale massively, are simple to deploy, and can be implemented at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. These platforms will emerge as the new standard. Elasticsearch offers this today, as evidenced by the 10M total downloads to date, and I have not seen this type of viral growth in enterprise software in the last decade.

And lastly, I fundamentally believe, having spent a significant part of my career living or working in Asia Pacific, Europe, or Latin America, that the long-term winners in our industry are those who approach international and emerging markets with the same intensity as they do mature markets. Elasticsearch shares this belief more so than any other company I have encountered at such an early stage.

If you want to be a part of this energy, growth, and innovation, head on over to our jobs page. You can drop us a line at jobs@elasticsearch.com, or you can contact me directly at aaron@elasticsearch.com.