Elastic’s Andrew Habgood on the company’s changing relationship with MSPs

The search company now sees MSPs as partners, rather than customers.

Andrew Habgood, the VP of global partner sales international at Elastic is putting his faith in the search company’s partners to continue its growth plans.

Speaking to CRN Australia at ElasticOn in Sydney, he said, “We believe we will grow and outgrow by embracing partnerships. Partners, we are trying to make an extension of us.”

Over the past year, Habgood has been on a mission to change the way Elastic views its MSPs. Previously, they were seen as customers, and now they’re viewed as partners so they can scale growth with them.

This new strategy was rolled out in APAC last year, and from May 1, will be going global. Elastic is looking to apply this strategy towards their MSSPs too, Habgood noted.

“That's been effective down here, and we're looking to accelerate that, particularly in the MSSP space,” he said.

Elastic also wants to be clearer about how they grow MSPs.

“Historically, as we were growing, we treated [partners] as customers. You're an MSP and you want to buy our stuff. Fantastic. But we didn't talk to them about how do we build go-to-market plans, how do we go and reach more customers,” Habgood explained.

He said Elastic wants consultative partners, “we want partners that open doors”.

"These guys have resources to build a SOC, resources to manage the security operations, as you come down here, skill shortage, cost complexity, they're not doing it themselves,” he said.

“They're looking at how do we leverage someone else? Embracing MSSPs to make sure that manage those providers of all types, but MSSPs particularly, so they can provide an outcome there with elastic to reach those customers is important.”

To keep partners, as partners, Elastic has also opened its sales training to them.

“Every bit of sales training we give, we give free to partners now. Every bit of sales play or otherwise that we train our own sales teams on, we train our partners on,” he said.

“We're putting things in their hands.”

A quarter or so ago, Habgood said Elastic gave their partners visibility of their customers cloud consumption.

“We have a great tool for our customers to see how much they're using, but the partners couldn't see that,” he said.

“We're putting all that capability into the portal to make sure our partners are equipped to continue to be an extension of elastic so, and that'll be the mission as we go forward.”

Partner tracks

According to Habgood, they will have a very clear resell service, build and manage set of tracks.

“The reason is to make sure that if you're not a straight reseller combined partner, where you can climb up the tiers because of the value of what you sell as well as what you do, sometimes it's been hard to get investment or recognition,” he explained.

“Our plan is that resell partners will continue to have a three-tier program, we will continue to support them on the journey, reward them for the sales they do, but particularly for the sourced opportunities they create.”

For service partners who don’t primarily sell, Habgood highlighted that they still want to invest in them.

"We're building some investments that will pay those providers to deliver outcomes for customers, so they will have services incentives, and they'll have a series of recognitions,” he said.

“As they grow, as they build their capabilities, we can recognise them instead of saying, well, you didn't sell anything.”

Habgood also sees potential for ISVs who are building on the Elastic platform. He said there has been an excess of 5 billion downloads from the community, up from 4 billion nearly a year ago.

“What that means is there's a lot of ISVs who are building us in their stacks,” he said.

“Publicly we've talked about and again, but people like DocuSign and others in the past who are offering a large SaaS platform, and they're using Elastic as a technology to underpin provide the search capabilities for whatever they do.”

There are also a lot of ISVs and OEMs who want to go to market, Habgood noted.

“They've created a package solution, and they want to repeat that in multiple customers, whether that's on premise or in cloud or otherwise, so making sure that we have a build program that supports ISVs,” he said.

Future plans

Asking about his future plans, Habgood said he is always wanting to do more and pushing for the next big thing for his partners.

"Our CRO Mark Dodds in a one-on-one, said, ‘what's been happening?’ I said, ‘we've just built a distribution framework for global, we're running it out of Asia, and we're doing these things’.

“Dodds asked, ‘so, you're satisfied?’ I said, ‘Mark, if I'm satisfied, I'm in the wrong job’.”

Habgood elaborated, “We've got to keep moving. When we talked last year, a focus for us was recruiting and developing security partners and AI partners.

“That was an area I felt we had a strength in ANZ on observability and search to some extent, and we need to continue on that journey.”

He again highlights the importance of MSSPs to Elastic.

“The MSSPs that we're working with down here again, [we are] pivoting and scaling them, because they've been using our technology for some years, but unlocking that growth through partnership is important to me,” he said.

“And AI continues to evolve, every SI says they can do AI, and what are they doing and how are they doing it?

“We want to support any of them that want to have that conversation. But we also want to make sure that we are identifying the right ones that can really serve customers and our interests in getting Elastic technology deployed.”