Nice post Darth, thanks!
I noticed this similar blog yesterday, from Endgame side of house: https://www.endgame.com/blog/executive-blog/joining-forces
What I find most interesting is the sales motion here.
There are a ton of endpoint security companies, from legacy hardware like Cisco, PANW, Forcepoint, Trend Micro, and upcoming IPO Crowdstrike, etc etc…
So my first thought was similar to when Nutanix started broadening their product base so rapidly, and I worried their sales teams would lose some of that laser focus on HCI that was core to their growth.
But in Elastic’s case, they focus on the “bottom up” approach and their Users drive/create use cases. I have pointed out that they tend to say “use case” a ton of times in their CC, about 30 times in each of the past two ER CC’s.
From that Endgame blog:
“Endgame would gain an ability to get our endpoint technology into the hands of dev ops, security practitioners, and IT users throughout the world, and Elastic would gain access to endpoint telemetry in the market in order to enhance a security use-case their users were already embracing.”
So this is approaching endpoint security, imo, from a much different angle than I traditionally see in IT sales. Often IT (hardware side) is in charge of creating/procuring the infrastructure
(on-prem or in cloud) needed to run the apps/workloads demanded by the business and developers and DB admins, etc… So if the dev ops folks are already looking at and familiar with Elastic solutions and then take it a step further with the Endgame software, it basically cuts out a step in the sales cycle, and when Cisco or whoever looks to push Endpoint Security with the IT contacts in charge of either Security or Personal Systems (or sometimes the Network team) they will be told there is no need.
The “other wireless devices” category could be interesting too…and is basically IoT in my mind. If you have thousands of sensors deployed in factories or field or wherever, and you want immediate/actionable data regarding alerts or security issues, etc… and you want to also secure that environment at the same time, then Elastic could provide the whole package.
Without digging into it too much, this is how I read it at a high-level.
I like the move, but I still want to hear/see more about Enterprise search and other use cases outside of endpoint, but due to the Endgame acquisition being so fresh, that is probably where the PR focus will be for a bit.
Elastic is/was also at BoA/Merrill Lynch Tech Conf today: https://ir.elastic.co/event
Dreamer