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Good example because their strategy is to move away from consultancy/training/support as their primary business model towards shipping add on services, cloud products, etc. I was at Elastic.on beginning of the year where they talked a bit about their thinking. They referred to 'other' OSS companies having contradicting goals where in order to sell support/training, they make the base OSS product harder to use and more complicated so that people actually need the support and training. E.g. having great documentation directly conflicts with selling training and consultancy. They did not want to differentiate between a hard to use OSS version and a nicer commercial package. Instead they want users to pay for added value in the form of bundled stuff that is not OSS (but now mostly available for free), or cloud based SAAS products that they run for you. The core product is the same for everyone. So, their strategy is already exactly as suggested in the article: great OSS that they actively help build complemented by SAAS business and other services where they are making a lot of money. Looking at their acquisitions, they have been buying companies that do SAAS business on top of their core technology or support that business in some way. Elastic cloud is based on one of their early acquisitions (a company called found.no). Another more recent one is Swiftype which provides easy to integrate search as a service for small websites. Then there's Prelert which provides incident management and analytics tooling. In addition they've been investing in building out geospatial data for the purpose of supporting analytics use cases using their Kibana tool (another of their acquisitions) and now included as part of Elastic cloud. They've bought packetbeat and opsworks that both focus on infrastructure OSS that supports getting data to Elasticsearch and Kibana. Of course they also still do support, consultancy, training, etc. as well. But that is a tougher business to scale because it involves lots of handholding. That's actually a key problem with this business: you need lots of sales to close deals and then you need lots of consultants to actually keep the customers happy. Looking at IBM and Oracle, you can clearly see that they are struggling there. IBM is looking to buy credibility for their cloud solutions through Red Hat. They've been struggling for years with consultancy as their core business and have been laying off people aggressively as revenues have been disappointing. They have at this point very little in house tech to draw in new customers. AWS is all about selling their cloud stuff. If it's OSS and widely used, you can bet there's an AWS service from them that you can use (e.g. Elasticsearch, Hadoop, ActiveMQ, Mysql, Postgresql, Redis, etc.). |
Interestingly enough, I've heard the same criticism about OpenLDAP, that it's deliberately hard to set up and poorly-documented because the main developer owns a consulting company and wants people to hire him to set up their OpenLDAP installations. What's ironic is that this is one of the reasons Red Hat is deprecating OpenLDAP in favor of the 389 Directory Server.