Elastic, the software company behind the open-source search engine Elasticsearch, has inked an expanded partnership deal with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba, giving it more access to the Asian market.
Under the new deal, Alibaba Cloud and Elastic will provide customers with access to an Elasticsearch offering dubbed Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch. With it Alibaba Cloud customers will be able to deploy Elastic’s real-time search, logging, and analytic tools as a hosted service. The expanded collaboration will ensure customers across the globe can access Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash, popular Elastic open source products and access property features including security, monitoring, alerting and machine learning for search.
"China is a growing market for us, and over the past few years, we've seen the Elasticsearch community organically expand to more than 5,000 developers," Shay Banon, Elastic Founder, and CEO said when announcing the new partnership. Prior to the expanded partnership, the search engine was available only in China but now Alibaba Cloud customers outside of the country can tap the real-time tools.
The service is available immediately to Alibaba Cloud customers, with access via an add-on to the cloud computing services already used by the customer. After that, they can embed Elasticsearch tools into new and legacy applications. The companies said they will work together to keep the service up to date with new features and will make new services available down the road. Ever since Elastic and Alibaba Cloud inked a deal last year, the engineering teams of the two have been working closely to ensure customers of Alibaba Cloud will be able to deploy all of Elasticsearch features.
"Across the world, companies are moving to the cloud and are demanding a hosted Elasticsearch service with access to the full breadth of features, open source, and commercial," Craig Griffin, Head of Business Development at Elastic said in a report when the deal was announced. "Alibaba Cloud has proven to be a wonderful partner for us in the China market, and together we look forward to expanding our relationship to offer Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch to the many more regions across the globe.”
The move on the part of Alibaba to expand its partnership with Elastic comes at a time when it is expanding into new markets outside of its home country. At the same time that it announced the expanded deal with Elastic it unveiled the ASEAN Partner Alliance Programme which is aimed at recruiting 150 solution partners and to train 600 sales and technology workers during the next 12 months.
