How challe...

Question

How challenging is it to sell against competitors in the sales role at Elastic?

Former Employee · Accepted Answer

It's very challenging.  Competitive solutions are very feature rich and out perform the platform message offered by Elastic. Strong competition from Splunk, Cribl, Data Dog, AWS, Google Cloud, Sentinel One.  The strongest competitor is open source--customers don't see the value of paying for support.

Current Employee · Answer

It's really hard, and the product is really complicated...

Current Employee · Answer

It is very difficult to do especially if the customer is contractually obligated, ie in year 1 of 3 or something similar with another vendor.  One of the biggest knocks of Elastic is that it is not truly a SAAS solution and you will need technical resources who can deal with the shared responsibility model.  Splunk, DataDog, etc are certainly competitors but the biggest one is Elastic's open source.  Once a client has scaled up significantly with free and open it is VERY difficult to get them to opt into an on prem commercial agreement because some of these additional features can be found outside of Elastic and at that point, all they would be paying for is Support.    Don't even get me started on trying to move a free and open customer to a managed service.  The cost difference (even open source has a cost to maintain the day to day) is MASSIVE and many clients simply can't out their arms around that.

Current Employee · Answer

It's not that it's challenging, it's the lack of opportunities to do so. Unless Elastic is being used within the accouny (typically at the engineer level via open source which poses its own challenges), there's very little chance you're being invited to the table. Elastic has very little market awareness outside of its engineer-focused open source community.

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Anonymous Q&A

How challenging is it to sell against competitors in the sales role at Elastic?