On ushering in a new CEO. Notes from one entrepreneurial soulmate to another.

<html><head></head><body>A Note from Steven Schuurman

Rarely do you make decisions you know will shape the rest of your life.

Even though you fundamentally believe you are making the right choice, there&#x2019;s still a part of you that&apos;s not 100% sure. You&#x2019;re torn between deep rooted emotions &#x2014; loyalty, ambition, a strong sense of responsibility &#x2014; on the one hand, and an equally strong urge to make a change on the other.

This is how I felt when I decided to co-found Elastic. It is also how I felt when I told fellow Elastic founder Shay Banon I decided to step down as CEO of Elastic.

I knew it was coming, but what I didn&#x2019;t know I was going to tell him at 07:30am at Schiphol airport; utterly unprepared. Knowing all too well that the impact of my decision would have an impact of similar magnitude on his life as it would on mine, I shared my decision. The conversation and subsequent series of events that followed I consider exemplary of the deep relationship we both built over the years.

Long story short, I barely had to explain why. Shay understood immediately as we have always been 100% transparent with each other &#x2013; no exceptions. Here is my thinking: in its essence, I feel the time has come for me to hand over the CEO-baton, as Elastic gears up for the next phase in the company&#x2019;s evolution. I have loved every single element of founding, building, nurturing, shaping and tuning all aspects of the company, but feel my job here as CEO is complete. The foundation is ready.

Elastic has the potential to be the world&#x2019;s next great software company, if it&#x2019;s lead by a truly inspiring visionary leader, that is not afraid of making grand, bold moves. That person is none other than my entrepreneurial soulmate, Shay.

Even though I have carried the CEO title since the inception of the company, he has always been my co-pilot. Wherever we steered our phenomenal rocket ship; we decided on its course together.

Today, I am thrilled to announce that Shay has accepted this new challenge, and will be the CEO of Elastic as of May 1st 2017. I will continue to serve on Elastic&#x2019;s Board of Directors in a non-executive capacity and watch closely over the company&#x2019;s success, which I&#x2019;m sure will continue to blow my mind like it&#x2019;s done since the beginning.

I&#x2019;d like to express a very deep and profound thank you to my co-founders Uri Boness and Simon Willnauer; none of what we have built over the past 5 years would have happened without you. An equally special thank you to my insanely talented executive leadership team; you are brilliant to work with and have made building Elastic easier than a walk in the park on a sunny afternoon. The same holds true for my investors and board members: Peter Fenton from Benchmark Capital, Mike Volpi from Index Ventures, the recently deceased and dearly missed Harry Weller from NEA, Harry&#x2019;s successor Chetan Puttagunta, and lastly, my SpringSource co-founder Rod Johnson. Your dedication is a wonderful source of inspiration, I will forever carry with me.

To all other Elastronauts; I am proud to have served as your CEO, you know I love you. Speak soon.

A Note from Shay Banon

Steven, since the start of our company, what I loved in our partnership is that the definition of roles between us was very flexible. We did what is right for the company, with no ego involved. This gave me the opportunity to roam the company and help where needed, a role that went beyond a typical CTO role, and beyond being &#x201C;just&#x201D; product or technology focused.

It&#x2019;s been a truly amazing 5 years. We are humbled by the adoption of our products &#x2014; we&#x2019;re approaching 100 million total downloads &#x2014; and the growth of our community, which now spans 100 countries with 80,000 members. As it&#x2019;s been said before, we wouldn&#x2019;t be here without our entire community, and we&#x2019;re not going anywhere without your help.
I am excited to take the lead and assume the CEO role, navigate our company through its next phase of evolution, and make sure we build a technology company to last. Our strength as a company is our people, our products, our users, and our responsibilities as a leading tech company (a start is the &quot;<a href="/blog/on-immigration-and-diversity">On Immigration and Diversity</a>&quot; post I wrote), and I feel humble and am ready to lead Elastic to its next level.
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The Next Chapter: Shay Banon to Succeed Steven Schuurman as Elastic CEO

<html><head></head><body>When Shay, Uri, Simon and I founded Elasticsearch in 2012, we always knew we were signing up to provide more than &quot;just search&quot; 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 <a href="http://www.elasticon.com/apex/Elastic_ON_Agenda" target="_blank">lineup of customers and users</a> we have at our first user conference, Elastic{ON}, I feel humbled. There&apos;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&apos;ve even entered the final frontier, with NASA&apos;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&apos;re about much more than just search. We&apos;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&apos;t be extracted before, and we&apos;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&apos;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&apos;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:<img src="https://api.contentstack.io/v2/assets/575e4d8d3dc542cb38c0ae94/download?uid=blt65915382fe79c804?uid=blt65915382fe79c804">As a growing number of people, including myself, have been referring to us as &quot;Elastic&quot; since the inception of the company anyway, we believe this is actually a very fitting brand name for our us.But there&apos;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&apos;t experienced before. We always felt that there was a good chance that this would happen &#x2013; one company running many ELK clusters &#x2013; 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&apos;ve also announced today that we acquired Elasticsearch SaaS provider Found (<a href="https://found.no/" target="_blank">https://found.no/</a>), 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 <a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/welcome-found">his blog post</a>.I&apos;d like to personally thank everyone that&apos;s been with us on our journey so far. It&apos;s been quite a ride, and it&apos;s far from over. For those that want to join us on our adventure, follow us on our new Twitter handle <a href="http://twitter.com/elastic">@elastic</a> and our brand new website <a href="https://www.elastic.co">elastic.co</a> &#x2013; we&apos;ve got a lot more exciting things in store for 2015 and beyond!</body></html>

Elastic: For - You Know, More Than Search

<html><head></head><body>When we originally built Elasticsearch, we architected it to serve as a powerful search engine that could easily scale across a distributed environment and be used to both search and analyze any type of data &#x2014; essentially serve as the backbone for a business to centralize, explore, and extract insights out of any data they want. When we released the software four years ago, however, using a search engine to also perform operational and even business analytics was a completely foreign, somewhat extreme idea &#x2014; so we let our users make this discovery on their own.

Fast forward to nearly 20 million downloads later and 4x customer growth in 2014, businesses worldwide continue to implement Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana for an endless variety of use cases. Adoption started with end user-facing sites like <a href="/blog/holiday-viewing-pleasure-facebook-elasticsearch/">Facebook</a>, <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.com/customer/github/">GitHub</a>, and <a href="http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2013/12/cool-new-space-cool-new-tech.html">Yelp</a> implementing us for search, then moved to businesses like <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/gabriellavanvuure/ing-and-elasticsearch-meetup-nov17-jaap-hagenaar">ING</a>, <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.com/webinars/elk-on-cisco-ucs/">Mozilla</a>, and TomTom utilizing Elasticsearch for log analysis.

Over the past year, we&apos;ve started to see ELK stack usage align with our initial vision of powering custom analytics use cases &#x2014; many that have far exceeded our wildest dreams. <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.com/customer/guardian/">The Guardian</a> built its own analytics tool on top of Elasticsearch to make sure it publishes and presents the right news content on its site at the best time of day, not only leveraging data to make sure its content gets maximum exposure but also to guide its editorial strategy by evaluating which content its audience reads. <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/BDPAFoundation/a-mayo-clinic-big-data-implementation">Mayo Clinic</a> uses our software to analyze patient data. Financial services firms analyze trade data with Elasticsearch to help advise their clients on investment decisions. Criminal investigative units put forensics data in Elasticsearch to help solve crimes. The list goes on &#x2026;.

Needless to say, businesses continue to put more and more data into the ELK stack to extract insights. In order to meet customer demand to utilize ELK across even more of their business, we&apos;re extremely excited to introduce <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.com/products/shield/">Shield</a>, a security and administrative plugin to the ELK stack that makes it easier for our customers to do even more things with their most valuable asset: their data.

Shield&apos;s introduction today follows a successful beta with a handful of our users and customers. Some of the new capabilities Shield provides that let businesses do even more with the ELK stack include:

<ul>
	<li>Multitenant role-based access control: With the ability to manage who can access what data, as well as the permissions around what they can do with it, businesses can feel comfortable increasing the amount of data they put in to Elasticsearch. During the Shield beta, we worked with the internal IT services team at one of the largest local governments in the U.S. They use Elasticsearch to centralize logs from 38 departments across 1,000 servers. Shield will allow them to scale their operations by giving each department access to the logs by providing role-based access multitenancy, setting permissions for each department to only have access to its own data.</li>
	<li>Integration with existing enterprise infrastructure: Open source software tends to be powerful and easy-to-use, and therefore adds value right away, but where it gets dinged at times is its ability to integrate into existing enterprise infrastructure. The LDAP-based authentication support in Shield lets the ELK stack integrate with authentication systems like Active Directory, easing administrative complexity by allowing IT to continue to manage access to all their systems in a central place.</li>
	<li>Compliance with security regulations: Thanks to the audit logging feature in Shield, businesses under heavy regulation can use Elasticsearch for data that&apos;s regulated or governed with a complete record of all user activity in their Elasticsearch deployment. A multi-national financial services corporation in our Shield beta started using Elasticsearch to detect credit card fraud. The audit logging provided by Shield allows them to meet compliance regulations by providing a record of who has access to regulated data in Elasticsearch and what they&apos;ve done with it.</li>
	<li>Secure extension to the cloud: As a lot of us know, cloud infrastructures give businesses significant cost savings when it comes to utilizing massive amounts of data at scale. Thanks to Shield&apos;s node-to-node, certificate-based SSL/TLS encryption, businesses can feel more comfortable deploying Elasticsearch in their cloud environments knowing their data is encrypted when in-flight.</li>
	<li>More manageable expansion of ELK: Also thanks to role-based access control, Elasticsearch customers can set who can access and do what with the data in Elasticsearch, helping to prevent unfortunate human errors that occur from time to time (like accidentally deleting or editing data).</li>
</ul>
Shield is available starting today as part of our Development, Gold, and Platinum subscriptions (which means it&apos;s *free* for existing customers!). Those interested in checking it out can download a free 30-day trial at <a href="http://www.elastic.co/products/shield/">www.elastic.co/products/shield/</a>.

We couldn&apos;t be more excited about the next evolution of both our software stack as well as our business, and hope our users are, too.
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Shield: Redefining What You Can Do with ELK

<html><head></head><body>With unbelievable pride, I&apos;d like to announce that we just closed another amazing round of financing. In this Series C round, which was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with contributions from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures, we raised $70M. NEA General Partners Scott Sandell and Harry Weller led NEA&apos;s investment in Elasticsearch. Harry will be joining our Board of Directors, and you can look forward to his thoughts on our round later today.Over the course of three rounds of financing, Elasticsearch has raised a grand total of $104M since we started seeking capital just 18 months ago.The last year and a half has been an amazing adventure, and quite frankly I only feel like we&apos;re just about to shift into the highest gear. With some of the highest caliber customers already on board, from Facebook to The Guardian, our products are powering some of the world&apos;s most sophisticated search and analytics engines. In addition to our most well-known use case, businesses are now commonly using our logging solution. Bloomberg uses the Elasticsearch ELK stack to centralize 1.5B log lines/day, generated across 1,000s of production machines. The ability to centralize them in one place to troubleshoot any potential issues saves their 2,000 programmers an immense amount of time and hassle.Even better, we&apos;ve built a world-class team to fuel our product development and commercial activities. We&apos;ve benefited greatly from the support from our board members Rod Johnson, Peter Fenton and Mike Volpi in our search for new business and talent. The experience these guys bring to the table is invaluable to us, as we&apos;re moving quickly to respond to the immense market demand for the ELK stack. As we&apos;ll only be expanding our efforts from here, we chose to go with an investment firm with deep open source and enterprise software experience at scale. One that could help us grow aggressively and propel our products offerings forward. Of all the top-tier Venture Capital firms out there, we believe the team at NEA stands out as the one best positioned to help us execute against our plans during this phase of extremely rapid growth. We are nothing short of humbled by the fact that after having signed up Benchmark and Index, we get to work with this third team of wonderfully talented people. Together, Benchmark, Index and NEA are some of the best investment firms and people in open source.The company will be using the additional funds to continue to expanding our investment in our open source products, whilst also expanding our commercial presence across the globe. Elasticsearch&apos;s dual headquarters in Los Altos, California and Amsterdam, The Netherlands house about half of our global team. We have regional offices in Berlin, London and Phoenix, but they aren&apos;t the only places employees call home. We also have developers in Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Spain, Romania and states across the US. To facilitate our growth and remain close to our user base, we make our company&apos;s distributed nature work to our advantage. If you want to know more, check out <a href="http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026591/the-five-secrets-to-running-a-totally-distributed-company">this interview</a> I did with FAST company.Elasticsearch has always been a wonderful place to work. We offer our people - in all disciplines - the chance to work in an open and vibrant culture and learn from some of the best and brightest in our industry. With these additional funds, we&apos;re looking to continue our track record of hiring the best talent our industry has to offer. If you&apos;re interested in helping us build the world&apos;s next great software company, take a peek at <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.com/about/jobs/">our jobs page</a>. We&apos;re incredibly excited about what the future holds. My thanks to all of our investors, and a huge thanks to all of our employees worldwide. We wouldn&apos;t be able to share today&apos;s news without all of your hard work, passion and dedication to a simple and beautiful customer experience!</body></html>

Elasticsearch Raises $70M in Series C from NEA

<html><head></head><body><h2>Native Management and Monitoring for Deployments</h2>Today, we&apos;re making an announcement that&apos;s probably the most important one Elasticsearch has made since we founded the company.With unbelievable pride and excitement we would like to introduce you to <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.com/marvel">Elasticsearch Marvel</a> &#x2013; our brand new management &amp; monitoring product. Marvel is 100% native to Elasticsearch, built from scratch by the team that also develops Elasticsearch and is effectively the #1 requested ecosystem product requested for our product stack. We hope you will be as excited about it as we are!<h3>What does Marvel do Exactly?</h3>Marvel solves one of the most important challenges anyone who has deployed Elasticsearch has encountered: how to gain a complete view of the state of a deployment and how to manage clusters towards optimal health. Although Elasticsearch exposes a very rich set of system statistics through its Stats API, translating those outputs into actionable cluster health information is an entirely different issue. Marvel instantly provides much-needed visibility into a deployment, both in real-time and historically. <h3>Native Monitoring for Deployments</h3>Marvel is directly connected with every node in an Elasticsearch deployment and records and visualizes all metrics produced by each node in a cluster, allowing the operator to monitor the current, real-time state as well as the historical state of the cluster. This level of visibility into the Operating System, the JVM, and the various services that are running within Elasticsearch and Lucene, combined with low level system metrics like machine load, CPU, disk, network and memory usage, provide invaluable insights that weren&apos;t available before. Although deceivingly simple, being able to correlate core system metrics with Elasticsearch and Lucene specific metrics, is unbelievably valuable. No other off-the-shelf monitoring system is able to provide this level of transparency into your Elasticsearch deployment.<h3>How to get Marvel</h3>Getting Marvel is simple - you can install it via the command line or download it and install as you would any other Elasticsearch plugin. You can learn more at <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.com/marvel">http://elasticsearch.com/marvel</a><h3>The Rules are Simple</h3>We decided to make Marvel completely free for development use and downloadable without any registration of any kind. Marvel is a commercial product though, so if you want to use it to for your live deployment you need to buy a license. If you&apos;re an Elasticsearch subscription customer, you get a full license to use Marvel included with your subscription package. If you&apos;re not already a subscription customer, you can find all our product information at <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.com/marvel">http://elasticsearch.com/marvel</a>.And no, $500 for the first five nodes isn&apos;t a typo. We&apos;ve priced our offering to be affordable to any and all Elasticsearch users. We certainly hope you enjoy using Marvel as much as we enjoyed building it for you!</body></html>

Introducing Elasticsearch Marvel

It's been just over a year since Elasticsearch Inc was born, and about 3.5 years since our CTO, Shay Banon, first released Elasticsearch. From that time to now, we've brought almost 40 developers on board to grow and maintain the ecosystem around Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, and we've seen our software downloaded almost half a million times per month. Just a week ago, we hit the memorable milestone of 5,000,000 downloads, an impressive number by anyone's standard. The fact that nearly 4,000,0000 of those were downloaded over the last 12 months, and that number is growing at a rate of nearly 500,000 a month makes it even more special.

Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana are on fire, baby!

Members of all startups will consistently tell you how proud they are of their world-changing technology, phenomenal growth and market traction, and we are - of course - no exception. However, we'd like you to hear these things from our customers and our users, not from us.

To that end, we've had a robust case study program going for the past few months, leading to some pretty amazing stories of how Elasticsearch has helped companies create new revenue streams, improve their customer interaction, create stellar new application functionality and save money. Today, we'd like to share some of these case studies with you and, more importantly, to ask for you to let us know how you're using Elasticsearch.

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Watch how Elasticsearch powers Loggly's Cloud Based Log Management Service

<h2>Elasticsearch Powers Social, ECommerce, Education and Much More…</h2>
We've seen a number of compelling use cases for Elasticsearch across the full spectrum of social companies, including:

<h3>Klout</h3>
If you're one of the many household names using Klout to create campaigns that target social influencers, you're using Elasticsearch. <a href="/use-cases/klout">Take a look</a> at this case study to find out how Elasticsearch made it possible for Klout to provide their forthcoming self-service option to their customers, which Klout predicts will allow them to at least double their current revenues.

<h3>XING</h3>
XING is the leading business social network in Europe, with half its users located in Germany and the other half throughout the rest of Europe, Asia and Australia. XING has called their relationship with Elasticsearch a strategic partnership, far beyond a simple customer and service provider relationship. <a href="/use-cases/xing">Learn more</a> about how we've forged these deep ties with our customer by enabling XING to keep their users' updates flowing in real-time.

<h3>GitHub</h3>
Elasticsearch empowers GitHub's 4 million 'social coders' through providing search across GitHub's 8 million + code repositories. The GitHub team also makes use of Elasticsearch to monitor for abuse using some fairly clever logging hacks. You can get all the details in our <a href="/use-cases/github">GitHub case study</a>.

See how Elasticsearch Enables Stack Overflow's Users to Find the Answers They Need

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<h3>Focusmatic</h3>
Focusmatic provides its customers with brand insights from across all aspects of the social web: blogs and micro-blogging sites, video content, news outlets and social networks. Thanks to Elasticsearch, Focusmatic was able to scale to meet the needs of their current customers and, more significantly, be prepared to meet the needs of many more new customers, all at 75% less cost. <a href="/use-cases/focusmatic">Read all about</a> how Elasticsearch made it possible for Focusmatic to “continue their business."

<h3>Cogenta</h3>
Cogenta provides retail market data to high-end brand retailers in Europe, with plans currently underway to expand into 20 countries worldwide. Their real-time pricing intelligence platform tracks and analyzes competitive data on more than 20 million products. <a href="/use-cases/cogenta">Take a look</a> at how Elasticsearch helped Cogenta prepare for this customer base expansion at a 40% lower total cost of ownership.

<h3>Datadog</h3>
Datadog is a SaaS monitoring service startup for IT, operations and development teams that enables these teams to better analyze metrics and events, ensuring their operations continue smoothly. By using Elasticsearch, Datadog was able to scale to take on larger customers who produce 500x more events than Datadog could originally handle. You can <a href="/use-cases/data-dog">learn all about</a> how Elasticsearch helped Datadog increase their event handling capacity by 11x.

<h2>How Are You Using Elasticsearch?</h2>
We are always excited to hear from anyone using Elasticsearch: we want to know why you chose Elasticsearch, plus how it has made life easier for you and better for your customers. <a href="http://twitter.com/elasticsearch">Drop us a line</a> anytime and share your story.

How the World is Using Elasticsearch

<html><head></head><body><h2>What You Need to Know</h2>We&apos;ve got some exciting news to share around Elasticsearch and Hadoop. Elasticsearch and <a href="http://hortonworks.com/">Hortonworks</a> have strengthened their relationship by <a href="http://hortonworks.com/partner/elasticsearch/">formally partnering up</a>, which has resulted in Elasticsearch now being the first certified <a href="http://hortonworks.com/hadoop/yarn/">Hortonworks Apache YARN</a> search vendor. With both Elasticsearch and Hortonworks being leaders in the open source space, this partnership will lead to a valuable integration between Elasticsearch and Hadoop that anyone using the open source products will benefit from. This is what Hortonworks said about our newly formed partnership:&#x201C;The over 400,000 downloads a month is a testament to the level of trust put into Elasticsearch. Since Elasticsearch and Hadoop are such critical elements to the data analytics infrastructure for a huge number of users, we&apos;re excited by this opportunity to join together and reach beyond our users&apos; expectations.&quot; Shaun Conolly, Vice President, Corporate Strategy at HortonworksElasticsearch&apos;s real-time data exploration, analytics, logging and search features combine really well with Hadoop and make for a powerful combination; very useful to anyone handling large volumes of data on a day to day basis. <h2>Why This Matters</h2>Our customers can now enhance their Hortonworks Hadoop based workflows with our rich query language, designed to help businesses ask better questions, get clearer answers and better analyze their business metrics, all in real-time. Elasticsearch plays well with all Hadoop distributions, including MapR, Cloudera, Pivotal HD and Amazon EMR, and we have plans to provide specific integration with Hortonworks&apos; HDP platform. This is what Shay had to say about our partnership with Hortonworks:&#x201C;We&apos;re moving quickly here at Elasticsearch. Just a few weeks ago, we announced <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/elasticsearch-and-hadoop/">Elasticsearch for Apache Hadoop</a>, so it&apos;s exciting to announce Elasticsearch now works with Hortonworks&apos; HDP Hadoop distribution. We&apos;re constantly working to improve our product so we can provide the most value to all of our users.&quot; Shay Banon, founder and CTO of Elasticsearch<h2>How Your Hadoop Infrastructure Can Benefit by integrating with Elasticsearch</h2>Often, data stores integrated into Hadoop can become a bottleneck due to the number of requests generated by the tasks running in the cluster for each job. The distributed nature of the Map/Reduce model fits really well on top of Elasticsearch because we correlate the number of Map/Reduce tasks with the number of Elasticsearch shards for a particular query. So every time a query is run, the system dynamically generates a number of Hadoop splits proportional to the number of shards available so that the jobs are run in parallel - your Hadoop cluster scales easily alongside Elasticsearch and vice-versa.Finally, Elasticsearch provides near real-time responses (think milliseconds) that significantly improve a Hadoop job&apos;s execution and the cost associated with it, especially when running on &apos;rented resources&apos; such as Amazon EMR. We&apos;ve got even more news in the works about Elasticsearch&apos;s integration with all things Hadoop. Follow this blog for future details! And, <a href="http://twitter.com/elasticsearch">let us know</a> how you&apos;re using Elasticsearch with Hadoop. We would love to hear about it.</body></html>

Elasticsearch and Hortonworks Partner

<html><head></head><body>Our Journey of Disruption
I believe Elasticsearch is destined for greatness, and here&#x2019;s why: since 2010 we have been constantly innovating Elasticsearch based on our vision for the future for one of the biggest holes in the IT landscape today, and that solution is now being downloaded thousands and thousands of times &#x2026; per day! But the innovation doesn&#x2019;t stop there; we have a talented team hard at work to bring further revolutionary ideas into the market, which you can expect hear more about in the future.
We believe this is how software innovation should work: think ahead and create wonderful products that don&#x2019;t just solve problems, but also create new possibilities. Elasticsearch fits this description very nicely. The product isn&#x2019;t merely a solution to problem; we find our customers actually creating new products based on Elasticsearch, that they wouldn&#x2019;t have been able to drive to market without it.
If you look at what we&#x2019;re currently working on, you&#x2019;ll undoubtedly agree that Elasticsearch is only the beginning of an exciting journey. The main reason being, that even though there are many other solutions out there that also solve part of the &#x201C;big data challenge&#x201D;, no other product was designed from the ground up to provide a single holistic end-to-end experience. Combine that with our team&#x2019;s near obsession with user friendliness, and you end up with a product that is really easy to use, and that&#x2019;s getting noticed. Now this is where we are today. However, we have some truly incredibly advanced ideas for releases that we believe will be as groundbreaking as Elasticsearch is today.
Passionate People Make The Difference
We are unbelievably passionate about creating Elasticsearch, and know there are more people like us out there. We are driven by our shared passion for making a difference. Creating products that allow others to have new insights into their business, or innovate by driving new products to market, is about as rewarding as it gets.
With us progressing Elasticsearch faster than ever before, we have to grow our tech team as well as the group of people that make up the commercial and operational side of our company. We are therefore looking passionate team-players in Sales, Marketing, Technology and Operations that love driving change. We are not interested in merely being ready for the future, we&#x2019;re creating it.
Roles
We&#x2019;re not exactly big believers in tight hierarchical layers and skills set requirements in job descriptions. That&#x2019;s why you won&#x2019;t find things like &#x201C;5 years of experience with X&#x201D; or &#x201C;Masters degree in ABC&#x201D; on our job postings. We need you to excel at what you do, or have the ambition to learn how to excel. Here&#x2019;s a quick overview of what kind of expertise we&#x2019;re seeking to expand our team with here at Elasticsearch.
Developing Software
We&#x2019;re looking for Elasticsearch developers that wish to help us progress our product. Whether it&#x2019;s contributing to the core (in Java) or to the clients (in many other languages) we would love to talk to you. You have the possibility to have a broad and exciting role, where your responsibilities go way beyond writing code. If you want to, you have the possibility to be involved in teaching training courses, creating marketing materials, talking to customers in commercial processes, and speaking at conferences around the world.
Customer Support
If you love working with happy customers that are about as excited about a product as you are, you should consider working at Elasticsearch to provide tech support to our customer base. It&#x2019;s growing fast, and they have questions that need answering.
Marketing &amp; Sales
We are as passionate about our business execution as we are about creating new technology. When you speak with us, you will find that our demand generation engine is designed and operated by the very best people in the industry. Our marketing team and our sales teams consist of true industry professionals that are experts in their field. Whenever I talk with anybody on the marketing or sales teams, it&#x2019;s very rewarding to see how proud they are to represent Elasticsearch. Here you have the opportunity to harness the great momentum of our open source technology to deliver outstanding products to our customers.
Location
We&#x2019;re a global company. Elasticsearch has its main European presence in The Netherlands, and its main US presence in the Bay Area just south of San Francisco, but we hiring into many other places. We have hubs of people in Paris, London, Berlin and Prague, but also have talented individuals working either from their homes across Europe and the US. To us, your location is less important than your qualities, so don&#x2019;t hesitate to contact us even if you&#x2019;re living 10,000 miles from our nearest office location.
Hear it directly from our developers &#x2026;
Our developers love to talk about Elasticsearch and what it&#x2019;s like to work here. You can meet them yourself on the <a href="http://elasticsearch.com/about/jobs/">video on our careers page.</a>
What this comes down to, is that if you want to help us revolutionize an industry by actually delivering a solution that works, please reach out to us. We&#x2019;d love to connect.
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Explosive Growth Fuels Demand For Talent

<html><head></head><body>I am thrilled to announce that we just secured a $24M Series B round of funding from Index Ventures.I know what you&apos;re thinking ... &#x201C;didn&apos;t you just close a $10M Series A in November?&quot; Yes we did, but this was very much the right thing to do for Elasticsearch as an open source project and as a company. Peter Fenton from Benchmark Capital led our A round, and Mike Volpi from Index&apos;s San Francisco office took the lead on our B Round - not a bad starting point for a company that&apos;s working hard to take Search way beyond merely querying data.In the light of our investment announcement, there are 3 topics we would like to share our thoughts on:<ol>
<li>Our rationale for raising Series B</li>
<li>Beyond just Search</li>
<li>The future of Elasticsearch</li>
</ol><h3>Raising Series B</h3>We did not wake up one day with the brilliant idea to set out and raise Series B. In fact, when the plan came together, we were still recovering from our previous fund raising adventure. We did have a great experience talking to some of the greatest minds in venture capital, and received great advice and feedback on how to build our company. Besides that, we learned that the investment community&apos;s interest in Elasticsearch was tremendous. This got the ball rolling, and sparked a series of brainstorm-style discussions that got us to start pondering what we would do if we raised an early B round. The answer came to us as quickly as the decision to look for Series B did. Raising a Series B allows us to execute faster on our growth plans for the company and thereby do a better job at serving our rapidly growing customer base on both sides of the Atlantic, in the US and Europe. The driver of this growth is the rapid evolution of search itself.<h3>Beyond Just Search</h3>Search today is so much more than it was even 5 years ago. The technology evolved into a data exploration mechanism and is now used in ways that go way beyond your basic &#x201C;free text search&quot; search box on the upper right corner of a website. Search has become top-of-mind for so many people and the world is quickly getting a handle on what search is actually capable of. We feel there are actually a number of reasons why search has made an amazing jump in popularity over the last 12 months: <ol>
<li>Search technology is more powerful, scalable and versatile than ever before</li>
<li>Search technology is easier to adopt than other analytics solutions out there</li>
<li>Data volume, velocity and variety has exploded since the beginning of the decade, making data querying solutions suboptimal</li>
<li>Data often appears in unorganized, unstructured formats and sources</li>
<li>Real-time data exploration has become relevant to almost anyone, in any role</li>
</ol>Search solutions like Elasticsearch have a very promising relationship with rapidly expanding data volumes. Whereas search technology and large data volumes fell in love many years ago, we like to believe they recently got engaged and they&apos;re currently planning their wedding. It wouldn&apos;t surprise us if this celebrity wedding actually lasted.What Elasticsearch made possible with its first release in 2009 (search beyond free text search), is now being adopted by some of the most data intensive organizations in the world. Next generation social network Path very recently announced advanced search functionality in their platform, and as recently as mid-January, Facebook launched its much-discussed Graph Search functionality.Also, with the search technology now capable of powering advanced real time analytics, we see an increase in users depending heavily on search technology to power their dashboards. 
We know of various companies that use Elasticsearch to drive Google Analytics-like features and can&apos;t afford for its service to be disrupted. Even trend analysis is something we see more and more often. For example, a user can query massive data sets though unstructured searches, sprinkle structure on top of the result sets to break down the result over time, and analyze results through a date histogram graph. Let&apos;s say that you&apos;re applying this formula to Twitter data, you would instantaneously see a trend in time: very powerful, yet extremely easy to realize these days with Elasticsearch.<h3>The Future of Elasticsearch</h3>It is our mission to make real-time data exploration available to anyone, and we feel Elasticsearch is very well positioned to achieve just that. Even though Elasticsearch is off to a good start, we feel there are still many places where we can add value into the future. As a company, one of our objectives is to accelerate the Elasticsearch learning curve and hereby shorten our users&apos; &#x201C;time-to-epiphany&quot;. The latter might sound a little odd, so allow us to explain. We find that many people still come to Elasticsearch for purely for classic search. Of course we are perfectly fine with that, but for those that are up for it, we want to be their main source for data analysis. Read: drive real time analytics through Elasticsearch, and truly benefit from what the product is capable of. We will work hard to help people go from their first download of Elasticsearch to their &#x201C;Ahaaa moment&quot; with Elasticsearch as soon as possible. This is going to be an important focus area for us.But there is more. We also want to make the overall Elasticsearch experience better. One area in which we will increase our investment is our documentation. Our current documentation is excellent for reference purposes, but requires work when it comes to hands-on tips and tricks for day-to-day usage. We know this, and expect to be making a significant leap forwards here during the course of 2013. The product itself will also continue to involve, and we expect that evolution to accelerate towards an even more feature complete release in the near future.Reliability is an important theme in the context of robustness. As Elasticsearch is playing a more and more mission critical part in the stacks of many organizations worldwide, we feel very responsible for the reliability of our product. That means we are engineering Elasticsearch in such a way and are adding new features that make it more dependable even in distressed situations, so that anyone using the product can sleep well at night, knowing that Elasticsearch takes care of your data.Steven &amp; Shay</body></html>

Way Beyond Search

<html><head></head><body>Have you ever had that feeling when - due to sheer excitement - it&apos;s hard to decide what to talk about first because there&apos;s just too much to tell? Well, that&apos;s where I&apos;m at right now&#x2026; Please allow me to jump right in.<h3>Adoption and Series-A Investment with Benchmark</h3>One of the most illustrative news items of last year was around our download numbers: 2012 was without any doubt the year Elasticsearch took off like a rocket ship. Within a year, our download numbers went from around 50k/month to more than 200k/month and we surpassed the 1.5 million downloads mark. In all my years in open source, including my years at SpringSource, I have never witnessed anything as spectacular as the speed at which the world is adopting Elasticsearch. Personally, I believe the popularity of the product isn&apos;t that hard to explain. I remember our investor Peter Fenton tweeting the following last November when we announced our Series-A with Benchmark:&#x201C;Jaw-dropping momentum, Big Data&apos;s killer app has arrived:@elasticsearch Benchmark thrilled to back the team&#x2026;&quot;I believe this statement to be spot on as Elasticsearch is groundbreaking in two very relevant aspects:1) Its power to drive information out of extremely large volumes of data 
2) Its user friendlinessThese two design characteristics combined with Elasticsearch being fast, real-time and highly scalable make that it lives up to Peter&apos;s aforementioned claim.&#xA0;<a href="http://www.elasticsearch.com/blog/elasticsearch-easy-complete-and-robust-just-like-our-product/">Here&apos;s</a>&#xA0;what I wrote about our Series-A investment from Benchmark, Rod Johnson and Data Collective last November.<h3>Elasticsearch in the Wild</h3>Another set of important highlights (which get us really fired up, and provide for very rewarding reading material) are the use cases we encounter in the wild. We now know Elasticsearch is literally used everywhere there&apos;s data &#x2013; and as we all know - companies are accumulating more data every day. To put it in perspective, Wired recently described Elasticsearch at &#x201C;Your Own Private Google.&quot;&#xA0;<a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/solar-elasticsearch-google/">The article</a>&#xA0;provides for an interesting read, so I recommend checking it out.However, there are many more use cases for Elasticsearch, and though out 2012 many people have been kind enough to share their experiences with us. To pick a few, here are some publications that are interesting to everyone considering making a move on Elasticsearch as their search &amp; analytics runtime of choice.<ul>
<li>SoundCloud 
SoundCloud wrote an&#xA0;<a href="http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2012/12/architecture-behind-our-new-search-and-explore-experience/">amazing piece</a>&#xA0;about completing the overhaul of their search infrastructure and elaborating why they chose to go with Elasticsearch. This blog contains useful insights on for example how the Elasticsearch user experience compares to other products out there.</li>
</ul><ul>
<li>McGraw-Hill 
On the other side of the market vertical spectrum, McGraw-Hill released a&#xA0;<a href="http://www.couchbase.com/presentations/couchbase-at-mcgraw-hill/">highly illustrative presentation</a>&#xA0;on how they realized significant innovation of learning aids using Couchbase and Elasticsearch.</li>
</ul><ul>
<li>GOV.UK 
Earlier last year, we were happy to learn that GOV.UK, the Government Digital Services group tasked with transforming the UK government&apos;s digital services, migrated to Elasticsearch as well.&#xA0;<a href="http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/08/03/from-solr-to-elasticsearch/">This post</a>&#xA0;was written by Rob Young, and focuses on why GOV.UK migrated to Elasticsearch.</li>
</ul><ul>
<li>Envato 
Jack Chen from Envato wrote a&#xA0;<a href="http://webuild.envato.com/blog/moving-the-marketplaces-to-elasticsearch/">detailed piece</a>&#xA0;describing why and how the Envato marketplaces migrated to Elasticsearch. Jack&apos;s blog features some very well done graphs on query performance and CPU usage.</li>
</ul><ul>
<li>Foursquare 
Prominent startup Foursquare also moved to Elasticsearch after having worked with various other open source search and/or NoSQL solutions.&#xA0;<a href="http://engineering.foursquare.com/2012/08/09/foursquare-now-uses-elastic-search-and-on-a-related-note-slashem-also-works-with-elastic-search/">This blog post</a>&#xA0;from the Foursquare engineering group elaborates on their reasoning. Foursquare mainly moved to Elasticsearch to ensure performance would never be compromized, even when data volumes continue to grow.</li>
</ul><ul>
<li>Obamaromneytweetbattle 
Lastly, one of my personal favorite Elasticsearch demos &#x2013; because it&apos;s such a graphical representation of Elasticsearch&apos;s capabilities: the&#xA0;tweet battle&#xA0;between Obama and Romney that lasted until the very end of the 2012 US presidential elections.</li>
</ul>If you&apos;re interested in sharing some of your Elasticsearch war-stories, we&apos;d love to&#xA0;<a href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/S3BYS58">hear about it</a>. Or, you can of course just&#xA0;<a href="https://twitter.com/Elasticsearch">follow us</a>&#xA0;on Twitter and tweet about your findings.At Elasticsearch we&apos;re grateful for all those wonderful stories that are being shared online by so many people. It&apos;s great inspiration for the entire Elasticsearch team and undoubtedly also for people considering test-driving Elasticsearch for a bit.So thank you very much for sharing &#x2013; and we look forward to hearing more from you in 2013.</body></html>

Some 2012 Elasticsearch Highlights

<html><head></head><body>With unbelievable excitement we just announced Elasticsearch secured $10M in Series A venture funding from <a href="http://www.benchmark.com" target="_blank">Benchmark Capital</a>, led by Peter Fenton. Other investors in the round include my SpringSource co-founder Rod Johnson and <a href="http://www.dcvc.com" target="_blank">Data Collective</a>. Being able to work with Peter Fenton and Rod Johnson again after SpringSource is nothing short of a privilege. Both are established open source visionaries and have already brought a lot of value to the company in terms of insights, network and general advice over the last few weeks.Three reasons stand out why Benchmark, Rod, and Data Collective believe in Elasticsearch: the product and the company:<ol>
<li>Adoption: 1.6 Million Downloads and Counting 
This is one of the areas in which Elasticsearch is special as an open source project. The project is currently being downloaded at a run rate of approximately 200,000 downloads per month, making it one of the most rapidly adopted solutions in big data and is used in mission critical applications by thousands of companies worldwide.</li>
<li>The Solution: Searching and Analyzing Big Data in Real Time 
Shay specifically designed Elasticsearch from the ground up to be a runtime environment that allows people to analyze and act on massive volumes of data &#x2013; in real time. Recent research from The Economist Intelligence Unit lists this exact objective to be the #1 challenge reported by their research population. Elasticsearch makes tackling this challenge easy and doesn&apos;t require you to be a data scientist to put it to good use.</li>
<li>Our Team: Deep Technical and Open Source Business Experience 
In the end our company is only going to be successful if the folks that are part of it are true professionals that know what they&apos;re doing, and have a laser-like focus on the success of anybody who uses Elasticsearch. This is what our team of former SpringSource veterans and technology specialist are doing every day.</li>
</ol>When Shay and I joined forces about 6 months ago, we set out to build a company based on our shared belief that we would be able to create a beacon of light in our industry. Our industry, mostly referred to as the big data market, is undeniably complex and extraordinary technology heavy. Many companies provide a solution that solves one of the many technical challenges companies are facing when aiming to gain competitive advantage from the massive volumes of data it&apos;s gathering on a daily basis. I believe that up until Shay created Elasticsearch, very few &#x2013; if any &#x2013;of the solutions available were able to make achieving this objective as easy as operating an Apple device.So in a way Elasticsearch already achieved its objective, which makes my life as the CEO of Elasticsearch a lot easier of course. However, we&apos;re not done. In fact, we&apos;re only getting started&#x2026;Since we launched the company, I have received many questions on where we want to take the company and what we plan on doing moving forward. The key element to the answer to that question has always been, that our way forward is merely a continuation of the path we&apos;re currently on. Please allow me to elaborate.The more we talk to people who use Elasticsearch, the more we are able to distill 3 main reasons why Elasticsearch is so popular. In a nutshell, people love our product because it is:<ol>
<li>Easy to use</li>
<li>Robust</li>
<li>Complete</li>
</ol>To us, this is an extremely important finding. Predominantly because this confirms that Shay and his team are achieving their objective: to make an extremely easy to use product that reliably delivers on its promise. The mere fact that a product achieve it&apos;s objective is actually not as common as it might seem. As products mature, markets mature and as product&apos;s established user base grows, it&apos;s not uncommon for product roadmaps to deviate from its original path due to heavy pressure from many outside forces. I believe that Elasticsearch was created after a solid vision, rather than based on feature requests from individual users. This has had a massive positive impact on Shay&apos;s ability to create a product that is usable for an immensely large audience, instead of just a handful of power users. Shay has not given in to temptations, but rather worked closely together with many users to create a user-friendly product that meets all critical requirements in a large number of use cases.The challenge for our company is to be as focused on being as easy to work with, robust and complete as our product is. Now that doesn&apos;t mean that there&apos;s nothing left to be desired. Au contraire, we are currently working hard on bullet proofing our support organization by scaling it out fast and fine-tuning our systems to ensure the quality of our support increases while our client base rapidly grows. We are also working on a public training course schedule that covers more cities across the globe, to ensure attendees never have to travel unacceptably far to attend a course. And as is to be expected, we are growing our executive team with talented professional that have the required skills to help grow our reach.With Elasticsearch now having a company behind it to propel it forward, it seems safe to conclude that the Big Data Dark Ages are now finally behind us.Steven &amp; Shay</body></html>

Elasticsearch: Easy, Complete and Robust – Just like Our Product

<html><head></head><body>Hi everyone,Today is a great day for the Elasticsearch project, all Elasticsearch users, open source in general and not in the least for my colleague, fellow company founder and originator of Elasticsearch - Shay Banon. Today is the day we launch the company behind Elasticsearch! In practice, this means that as of today, users and potential users of Elasticsearch have a definitive source for support, education and guidance with respect to developing, deploying and running Elasticsearch in production environments.Shay and I connected though a mutual acquaintance (company co-founder Uri Boness) and started to share ideas about setting up a company around Elasticsearch. As it turned out, Shay and I shared a vision of creating an innovative company that will really make a difference in the Big Data space, and is focused 100% at creating products that truly meet the needs of users. With my background as co-founder of SpringSource, the company behind the popular Spring Framework, open source was an obvious ingredient of course. It didn&apos;t take us long come to the conclusion that cooperating on serving customers and helping companies make successful use of Elasticsearch made a lot of sense. Only months later we setup a company that is committed to the success of Elasticsearch users and that is committed to open source. We take these commitments very seriously. I am therefore very pleased to state that Elasticsearch will also make contributions to the Apache Lucene project, which is for obvious reasons an open source project that&apos;s very close to our hearts. All the more reason for me to also be extremely excited of having one of the leaders of the Apache Lucene project, Simon Willnauer, as a co-founder of the company and technology leader on my team.Moving forward, Shay will continue to develop Elasticsearch, and will continue to develop a solution that&apos;s exactly what users want and what users need. As of right now, he has a whole team to back him up. During the next few months we will be adding talented Elasticsearch colleagues to the team, so if you&apos;re interested in being part of a great team of technologists in the big data search and analytics space, feel free to drop us a line!I truly look forward to working together with my wonderful team towards the continued success of Elasticsearch. It&apos;s going to be great.Cheers, 
Steven Schuurman, CEO</body></html>

Articles by Steven Schuurman