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At my job, we evaluated moving from AWS hosted ES to several of the Elastic offerings. Many of them were more expensive than AWS was before taking hardware into

At my job, we evaluated moving from AWS hosted ES to several of the Elastic offerings. Many of them were more expensive than AWS was before taking hardware into account (as in comparing cost of Elastic licensing vs the whole cost from AWS). This made it exceedingly difficult to justify the move. It's not only the headstart with the client (billing relationship in place), but the cost that hampers them.

michaelmior 6y ago
But isn't a big part of the reason Amazon can offer better pricing because of the scale of their existing client base? I'm not saying that they are doing this, but they could if they chose operate on very thin margins or even at a lost to keep their hold on clients and make up with it on other products in their ecosystem.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Hmm. Operating on thin margins to gain market share and drive competitors out of business, then making up the difference by creating sales in related businesses in their ecosystem doesn't sound much like Amazon...
- notyourday 6y ago
  In my experience it is that Elastic does not understand the market. About four years ago we have attempted to get their software . It felt like I was dealing with Cisco sales people circa 1998. They were clueless on how to do a multi hundred thousand dollar deal - think slow, inefficient, inflexible, unwilling to compromise on extra $500 add on that would have ended up being a rounding error.
  - lovehashbrowns 6y ago
    That's how it is for a lot of companies, not just Elastic. We have to deal with jfrog, who has separate billing teams for SaaS and on-prem so for us to switch from on-prem to SaaS is a pain in the ass. If AWS ever offers artifacts storage with more artifact types, then obviously we're switching. And that's just 100% so we don't have to deal with jfrog's dumb ass contracts anymore, never mind pricing. ugh the pain that comes from negotiating our contract every year. Or the pain that comes from trying to get trial licenses. Or the pain we're seeing now from switching to SaaS.
    - notyourday 6y ago
      And that's why AWS eats their lunch. Execs of Elastic ( and other companies ) should deal with their inept sales force rather than point fingers at AWS.
    - ayewo 6y ago
      You are right but the blunt truth is, no one—as is evident even here—wants to hear this bitter truth. If you eliminate all kinds of friction that will prevent current and future customers from paying you, you’ll have a well oiled growth machine on your hands. Instead of seeing this as a learning opportunity, some prefer to cry uncle. Only very well-run tech companies like Stripe [0] and others in its class understand this. 0: Stripe’s Patrick Collison correctly characterizes the issue of friction that plagues products that start out as B2D (business to developer) but grow into becoming a B2B: “So many B2B companies end up with homepages for which the only CTAs are annoying variants of "read case study", "download whitepaper", and "request a call". All stock photography; no product imagery. Stripe's growth thus far has been fueled by individual developers and founders signing up and growing with us to billions of revenue. As we scale, the "impatient developer" will remain the focus of our product development. Over time, however, we've been increasingly finding that large organizations (like Zoom/Atlassian/Maersk) want to adopt Stripe -- Stripe now has a lot of functionality that they can't get elsewhere. So, we're very eager to continue to grow this side of our business with Mike.“ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067211

michaelmior 6y ago

But isn't a big part of the reason Amazon can offer better pricing because of the scale of their existing client base? I'm not saying that they are doing this, but they could if they chose operate on very thin margins or even at a lost to keep their hold on clients and make up with it on other products in their ecosystem.

ethbr0 6y ago
Hmm. Operating on thin margins to gain market share and drive competitors out of business, then making up the difference by creating sales in related businesses in their ecosystem doesn't sound much like Amazon...
notyourday 6y ago
In my experience it is that Elastic does not understand the market. About four years ago we have attempted to get their software . It felt like I was dealing with Cisco sales people circa 1998. They were clueless on how to do a multi hundred thousand dollar deal - think slow, inefficient, inflexible, unwilling to compromise on extra $500 add on that would have ended up being a rounding error.
- lovehashbrowns 6y ago
  That's how it is for a lot of companies, not just Elastic. We have to deal with jfrog, who has separate billing teams for SaaS and on-prem so for us to switch from on-prem to SaaS is a pain in the ass. If AWS ever offers artifacts storage with more artifact types, then obviously we're switching. And that's just 100% so we don't have to deal with jfrog's dumb ass contracts anymore, never mind pricing. ugh the pain that comes from negotiating our contract every year. Or the pain that comes from trying to get trial licenses. Or the pain we're seeing now from switching to SaaS.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    And that's why AWS eats their lunch. Execs of Elastic ( and other companies ) should deal with their inept sales force rather than point fingers at AWS.
  - ayewo 6y ago
    You are right but the blunt truth is, no one—as is evident even here—wants to hear this bitter truth. If you eliminate all kinds of friction that will prevent current and future customers from paying you, you’ll have a well oiled growth machine on your hands. Instead of seeing this as a learning opportunity, some prefer to cry uncle. Only very well-run tech companies like Stripe [0] and others in its class understand this. 0: Stripe’s Patrick Collison correctly characterizes the issue of friction that plagues products that start out as B2D (business to developer) but grow into becoming a B2B: “So many B2B companies end up with homepages for which the only CTAs are annoying variants of "read case study", "download whitepaper", and "request a call". All stock photography; no product imagery. Stripe's growth thus far has been fueled by individual developers and founders signing up and growing with us to billions of revenue. As we scale, the "impatient developer" will remain the focus of our product development. Over time, however, we've been increasingly finding that large organizations (like Zoom/Atlassian/Maersk) want to adopt Stripe -- Stripe now has a lot of functionality that they can't get elsewhere. So, we're very eager to continue to grow this side of our business with Mike.“ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067211