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I know what you’re thinking … “didn’t you just close a $10M Series A in November?”

Yes we did, but this was very much the right thing to do for Elasticsearch as an open source project and as a company. Peter Fenton from Benchmark Capital led our A round, and Mike Volpi from Index’s San Francisco office took the lead on our B Round – not a bad starting point for a company that’s working hard to take Search way beyond merely querying data.

In the light of our investment announcement, there are 3 topics we would like to share our thoughts on:

1. Our rationale for raising Series B
2. Beyond just Search
3. The future of Elasticsearch

Raising Series B

We did not wake up one day with the brilliant idea to set out and raise Series B. In fact, when the plan came together, we were still recovering from our previous fund raising adventure. We did have a great experience talking to some of the greatest minds in venture capital, and received great advice and feedback on how to build our company. Besides that, we learned that the investment community’s interest in Elasticsearch was tremendous. This got the ball rolling, and sparked a series of brainstorm-style discussions that got us to start pondering what we would do if we raised an early B round. The answer came to us as quickly as the decision to look for Series B did. Raising a Series B allows us to execute faster on our growth plans for the company and thereby do a better job at serving our rapidly growing customer base on both sides of the Atlantic, in the US and Europe. The driver of this growth is the rapid evolution of search itself.

Beyond just Search

Search today is so much more than it was even 5 years ago. The technology evolved into a data exploration mechanism and is now used in ways that go way beyond your basic “free text search” search box on the upper right corner of a website. Search has become top-of-mind for so many people and the world is quickly getting a handle on what search is actually capable of. We feel there are actually a number of reasons why search has made an amazing jump in popularity over the last 12 months:

1. Search technology is more powerful, scalable and versatile than ever before
2. Search technology is easier to adopt than other analytics solutions out there
3. Data volume, velocity and variety has exploded since the beginning of the decade, making data querying solutions suboptimal
4. Data often appears in unorganized, unstructured formats and sources
5. Real-time data exploration has become relevant to almost anyone, in any role

Search solutions like Elasticsearch have a very promising relationship with rapidly expanding data volumes. Whereas search technology and large data volumes fell in love many years ago, we like to believe they recently got engaged and they’re currently planning their wedding. It wouldn’t surprise us if this celebrity wedding actually lasted.

What Elasticsearch made possible with its first release in 2009 (search beyond free text search), is now being adopted by some of the most data intensive organizations in the world. Next generation social network Path very recently announced advanced search functionality in their platform, and as recently as mid-January, Facebook launched its much-discussed Graph Search functionality.

Also, with the search technology now capable of powering advanced real time analytics, we see an increase in users depending heavily on search technology to power their dashboards.
We know of various companies that use Elasticsearch to drive Google Analytics-like features and can’t afford for its service to be disrupted. Even trend analysis is something we see more and more often. For example, a user can query massive data sets though unstructured searches, sprinkle structure on top of the result sets to break down the result over time, and analyze results through a date histogram graph. Let’s say that you’re applying this formula to Twitter data, you would instantaneously see a trend in time: very powerful, yet extremely easy to realize these days with Elasticsearch.

The future of Elasticsearch

It is our mission to make real-time data exploration available to anyone, and we feel Elasticsearch is very well positioned to achieve just that. Even though Elasticsearch is off to a good start, we feel there are still many places where we can add value into the future. As a company, one of our objectives is to accelerate the Elasticsearch learning curve and hereby shorten our users’ “time-to-epiphany”. The latter might sound a little odd, so allow us to explain. We find that many people still come to Elasticsearch for purely for classic search. Of course we are perfectly fine with that, but for those that are up for it, we want to be their main source for data analysis. Read: drive real time analytics through Elasticsearch, and truly benefit from what the product is capable of. We will work hard to help people go from their first download of Elasticsearch to their “Ahaaa moment” with Elasticsearch as soon as possible. This is going to be an important focus area for us.

But there is more. We also want to make the overall Elasticsearch experience better. One area in which we will increase our investment is our documentation. Our current documentation is excellent for reference purposes, but requires work when it comes to hands-on tips and tricks for day-to-day usage. We know this, and expect to be making a significant leap forwards here during the course of 2013. The product itself will also continue to involve, and we expect that evolution to accelerate towards an even more feature complete release in the near future.

Reliability is an important theme in the context of robustness. As Elasticsearch is playing a more and more mission critical part in the stacks of many organizations worldwide, we feel very responsible for the reliability of our product. That means we are engineering Elasticsearch in such a way and are adding new features that make it more dependable even in distressed situations, so that anyone using the product can sleep well at night, knowing that Elasticsearch takes care of your data.

Steven & Shay

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I just came back from Paris giving our elasticsearch training with @mvgroningen and talking at the first France elasticsearch meetup. You can easily see David influence, resulting in 100 people attending the meetup!.

David will continue his amazing work promoting elasticsearch, as well as contribute to the development of elasticsearch. You can also check David’s thoughts on joining our Elasticsearch.

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Adoption and Series-A Investment with Benchmark

One of the most illustrative news items of last year was around our download numbers: 2012 was without any doubt the year Elasticsearch took off like a rocket ship. Within a year, our download numbers went from around 50k/month to more than 200k/month and we surpassed the 1.5 million downloads mark. In all my years in open source, including my years at SpringSource, I have never witnessed anything as spectacular as the speed at which the world is adopting Elasticsearch. Personally, I believe the popularity of the product isn’t that hard to explain. I remember our investor Peter Fenton tweeting the following last November when we announced our Series-A with Benchmark:

“Jaw-dropping momentum, Big Data’s killer app has arrived:@elasticsearch Benchmark thrilled to back the team…”

I believe this statement to be spot on as Elasticsearch is groundbreaking in two very relevant aspects:

1) Its power to drive information out of extremely large volumes of data
2) Its user friendliness

These two design characteristics combined with Elasticsearch being fast, real-time and highly scalable make that it lives up to Peter’s aforementioned claim. Here’s what I wrote about our Series-A investment from Benchmark, Rod Johnson and Data Collective last November.

Elasticsearch in the Wild

Another set of important highlights (which get us really fired up, and provide for very rewarding reading material) are the use cases we encounter in the wild. We now know Elasticsearch is literally used everywhere there’s data – and as we all know – companies are accumulating more data every day. To put it in perspective, Wired recently described Elasticsearch at “Your Own Private Google.” The article provides for an interesting read, so I recommend checking it out.

However, there are many more use cases for Elasticsearch, and though out 2012 many people have been kind enough to share their experiences with us. To pick a few, here are some publications that are interesting to everyone considering making a move on Elasticsearch as their search & analytics runtime of choice.

• SoundCloud
  SoundCloud wrote an amazing piece about completing the overhaul of their search infrastructure and elaborating why they chose to go with Elasticsearch. This blog contains useful insights on for example how the Elasticsearch user experience compares to other products out there.

• McGraw-Hill
  On the other side of the market vertical spectrum, McGraw-Hill released a highly illustrative presentation on how they realized significant innovation of learning aids using Couchbase and Elasticsearch.

• GOV.UK
  Earlier last year, we were happy to learn that GOV.UK, the Government Digital Services group tasked with transforming the UK government’s digital services, migrated to Elasticsearch as well. This post was written by Rob Young, and focuses on why GOV.UK migrated to Elasticsearch.

• Envato
  Jack Chen from Envato wrote a detailed piece describing why and how the Envato marketplaces migrated to Elasticsearch. Jack’s blog features some very well done graphs on query performance and CPU usage.

• Foursquare
  Prominent startup Foursquare also moved to Elasticsearch after having worked with various other open source search and/or NoSQL solutions. This blog post from the Foursquare engineering group elaborates on their reasoning. Foursquare mainly moved to Elasticsearch to ensure performance would never be compromized, even when data volumes continue to grow.

• Obamaromneytweetbattle
  Lastly, one of my personal favorite Elasticsearch demos – because it’s such a graphical representation of Elasticsearch’s capabilities: the tweet battle between Obama and Romney that lasted until the very end of the 2012 US presidential elections.

If you’re interested in sharing some of your Elasticsearch war-stories, we’d love to hear about it. Or, you can of course just follow us on Twitter and tweet about your findings.

At Elasticsearch we’re grateful for all those wonderful stories that are being shared online by so many people. It’s great inspiration for the entire Elasticsearch team and undoubtedly also for people considering test-driving Elasticsearch for a bit.

So thank you very much for sharing – and we look forward to hearing more from you in 2013.

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Drew has been a long time elasticsearch user, and helped develop, manage and operate very large elasticsearch installations. Drew joined us to help sprinkle a bit more devops qualities to our team, as well as help improve our story in the devops land. His passion for clojure will also have an impact (or already is!).

Rashid needs no introduction if you are using logstash. He is the guy behind kibana, the beautiful interface built for logstash (or logstash “structured” log data). We love the work Rashid has done on Kibana, and obviously are excited about his knowledge of elasticsearch. Rashid will continue and develop Kibana full time with us, as well as dabbling more into our operational and management infrastructure.

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Joining our company, Clint will continue to do his thing, but now full time on elasticsearch. He will continue to develop the Perl libraries, help the community around elasticsearch, and sprinkle his high standards when it comes to keeping and making elasticsearch usable and easy to use.

Welcome Clint!

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Three reasons stand out why Benchmark, Rod, and Data Collective believe in Elasticsearch: the product and the company:

1. Adoption: 1.6 Million Downloads and Counting
   This is one of the areas in which Elasticsearch is special as an open source project. The project is currently being downloaded at a run rate of approximately 200,000 downloads per month, making it one of the most rapidly adopted solutions in big data and is used in mission critical applications by thousands of companies worldwide.
2. The Solution: Searching and Analyzing Big Data in Real Time
   Shay specifically designed Elasticsearch from the ground up to be a runtime environment that allows people to analyze and act on massive volumes of data – in real time. Recent research from The Economist Intelligence Unit lists this exact objective to be the #1 challenge reported by their research population. Elasticsearch makes tackling this challenge easy and doesn’t require you to be a data scientist to put it to good use.
3. Our Team: Deep Technical and Open Source Business Experience
   In the end our company is only going to be successful if the folks that are part of it are true professionals that know what they’re doing, and have a laser-like focus on the success of anybody who uses Elasticsearch. This is what our team of former SpringSource veterans and technology specialist are doing every day.

When Shay and I joined forces about 6 months ago, we set out to build a company based on our shared belief that we would be able to create a beacon of light in our industry. Our industry, mostly referred to as the big data market, is undeniably complex and extraordinary technology heavy. Many companies provide a solution that solves one of the many technical challenges companies are facing when aiming to gain competitive advantage from the massive volumes of data it’s gathering on a daily basis. I believe that up until Shay created Elasticsearch, very few – if any –of the solutions available were able to make achieving this objective as easy as operating an Apple device.

So in a way Elasticsearch already achieved its objective, which makes my life as the CEO of Elasticsearch a lot easier of course. However, we’re not done. In fact, we’re only getting started…

Since we launched the company, I have received many questions on where we want to take the company and what we plan on doing moving forward. The key element to the answer to that question has always been, that our way forward is merely a continuation of the path we’re currently on. Please allow me to elaborate.

The more we talk to people who use Elasticsearch, the more we are able to distill 3 main reasons why Elasticsearch is so popular. In a nutshell, people love our product because it is:

1. Easy to use
2. Robust
3. Complete

To us, this is an extremely important finding. Predominantly because this confirms that Shay and his team are achieving their objective: to make an extremely easy to use product that reliably delivers on its promise. The mere fact that a product achieve it’s objective is actually not as common as it might seem. As products mature, markets mature and as product’s established user base grows, it’s not uncommon for product roadmaps to deviate from its original path due to heavy pressure from many outside forces. I believe that Elasticsearch was created after a solid vision, rather than based on feature requests from individual users. This has had a massive positive impact on Shay’s ability to create a product that is usable for an immensely large audience, instead of just a handful of power users. Shay has not given in to temptations, but rather worked closely together with many users to create a user-friendly product that meets all critical requirements in a large number of use cases.

The challenge for our company is to be as focused on being as easy to work with, robust and complete as our product is. Now that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing left to be desired. Au contraire, we are currently working hard on bullet proofing our support organization by scaling it out fast and fine-tuning our systems to ensure the quality of our support increases while our client base rapidly grows. We are also working on a public training course schedule that covers more cities across the globe, to ensure attendees never have to travel unacceptably far to attend a course. And as is to be expected, we are growing our executive team with talented professional that have the required skills to help grow our reach.

With Elasticsearch now having a company behind it to propel it forward, it seems safe to conclude that the Big Data Dark Ages are now finally behind us.

Steven & Shay

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Personally, I am very excited about having Igor join us. We just got a big boost on our ability to execute on our vision that is Elasticsearch. Welcome Igor!

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Go ahead and read Karel thoughts on joining Elasticsearch, I would simply add that we feel lucky that we have Karel on our team, as it greatly helps us realize our vision around Elasticsearch, and our commitment to our community, specifically, the ruby one.

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What else can you think when you discover a software project which comes sprinkled with so many buzzwords: a RESTful HTTP interface, working with schema-free documents, talking in JSON through a rich DSL, horizontally scalable and distributed by design, cloud-ready and cloud-friendly? And that software project is a search engine? A hoax, clearly.

But then I downloaded the source code, had a look a it… and it seemed quite legit. I became suspicious – it seemed like a little bit too much work for a prank. So I installed said project, and, to my astonishment, it did seem to work the way it was advertised on the tin.

At that time, I was working as a lead developer for a social media monitoring application, which was using CouchDB and CouchDB-Lucene as core technologies, so, as you can easily imagine, my neural paths had just exploded like fireworks. Working with schema-free JSON-based documents over HTTP and using full text queries and facets was something I was used to, only this time, it looked way, way better.

Being a Ruby shop, we naturally needed a Ruby library for talking to Elasticsearch, and not being satisfied with the offering, I set out to write a Ruby gem for Elasticsearch. In spite of working hard to make it usable outside of our pretty specific use case, I never imagined it will get nearly nine hundreds of GitHub watchers and be featured on Railscasts in the process. Or that I will get to solve more then three hundred issues and pull requests, curating other people’s code and making sure the library does not crumble under the weight of different styles, approaches and opinions.

In no time, I was writing articles for the Elasticsearch site about creating data visualizations from search facets, writing self-hosted applications in JavaScript, installing Elasticsearch with Chef, and in the process got to write a Chef cookbook, Elasticsearch data adapter for Ember.js, a monitoring tool to check for health problems of the cluster. I presented about Elasticsearch at three conferences. In short, my life became fully immersed in this crazy project. During all that time, Shay was an immensely helpful source of information, advice, and inspiration for cranking out features with incredible speed.

Today marks a special day on this journey. As a member of the Elasticsearch.com team, I will be able to put more of my time and energy into Elasticsearch and the surrounding ecosystem — the Ruby library, provisioning and monitoring tools, research and documentation. My specific goal is to make it even more easy for Rubyists to work with full text search in their applications, to understand it better, and to make most of it.

After all, search is the primary means for keeping up with the vast amounts of data; every day, from Google to Mac OS X Spotlight, we rely on search to find information. In fact, the future of our civilization depends on how well we understand the data about ourselves, be it the global Twitter chatter, air pollution metrics, DNA sequences or evidence gathered by the Curiosity rover on Mars. I believe that full text search, and Elasticsearch in particular, will be an important part of this future.

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Fast forward a few years and there I was, with years of Lucene and Solr experience behind me, about to set up a company around open source search. I sat down with Steven and together we laid out the blueprints for the next generation search engine. We had a pretty good idea on the direction the information and data management world is heading. And we also knew what it was missing – A simple yet powerful distributed search engine, built to scale from ground up. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it .

Few months later, Shay released the first version of Elasticsearch. And as time passed, it became clearer to us all that our visions are too much aligned to be ignored. It took some time and effort, but we finally made it happen – today the Elasticsearch company was born.

It is the beginning of a new era. And not in the traditional definition of search, but in the modern definition of information retrieval. The definition by which data becomes accessible in the form of insightful knowledge, or simply put:

Making Sense of Your (Big) Data

Shay did an amazing job with Elasticsearch. It’s simply mind blowing to realize that he, single handedly, managed to build, support, consult and promote such as amazing piece of software and get it to where it is today. But even kimchyman has his limits. The community is immense. The install base is growing by the day (just the other day Elasticsearch reached the 1 million downloads mark on GitHub). The mailing lists and IRC channels are busier than ever. Companies are running their most critical runtime systems on top of Elasticsearch and demand continuous support. Elasticsearch, the company, no longer the missing piece in the success story of this product. It is here to support the continuation and development of the project, provide the much needed security for the ever growing install-base, and help expand the community through training and education.

There’s a long journey ahead of us, but an exciting one. And we invite you to join us in this journey and share the excitement.

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With the rise of NoSQL, Hadoop and being Big-Data everywhere Lucene’s star didn’t shine that bright without offering all these features out of the box and related projects like Solr are slowly catching up with scaling capabilities. But going from an idea to a mature and stable software is a pretty rocky path and it takes time and effort to go. Elasticsearch has gone down that path with all the hard problems in mind from day one. Hey, this is awesome – you know, for search!

However, it’s not just Buzz! 4 weeks ago at the Berlin Buzzwords conference you could literally feel how much momentum Elasticsearch gained in the last couple of years. Rooms were packed, engineers talking about success stories, limitations, features and improvements all over the place. This is healthy in a lot of ways and a good indicator that it’s time to take Elasticsearch to the next level.

When Shay, Steven, Uri and myself first talked about the idea to join forces and to establish Elasticsearch as a company it was already obvious to me that this is an enormous chance for Open-Source Search in general as well as Lucene being the underlying technology. As a company we heavily rely on the features, maturity and stability of the software we incorporate into Elasticsearch and in turn on the health of the Open Source community. It’s our job and responsibility to maintain it and push it forward.

I’m looking forward to a great time working together with great engineers on hard problems making the Elasticsearch user experience as smooth as possible and making Lucene the only choice when you need Search – and trust me you need it!

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Obviously, I knew all those things, but not many others did. Its funny, as Tim Robbins found out in the classic Cohen brothers movie, “The Hudsucker Proxy”, getting people to see a circle and state “You Know, for Kids!”, and making the leap to understand what it can actually be is not simple.

Thomas Jefferson said: “I am a great believer in Luck, and I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it”. Elasticsearch was and is certainly not a walk in the park. Building a distributed system, that can handle massive amounts of data, and still be usable is no simple task. I do feel lucky though, we live in an age where anyone can open a laptop and set out to change the world (a bit), with extra luck points for having an understanding spouse.

More than that, I feel lucky with the community that evolved around Elasticsearch. It caught me by surprise the speed at which Elasticsearch got adopted. I knew that something was missing, I just couldn’t believe how quickly people will realize it as well. I am very proud of what happened around Elasticsearch, the ecosystem that developed around it, and the users actually taking and using it in real systems and in production.

But, dodging buses like crazy for the past couple of years has left me exhausted, and the user’s request for having something formal around Elasticsearch, the need to feel safe, has been increasing exponentially. You see, I have seen it happen for 10 years now, it usually starts with “lets just have a search box so people can search some content”, and quickly evolves to using it in many other parts of the stack / system, quickly increasing its importance in the application.

Luckily (do you notice a trend?), a few months ago, my good friend from the Compass days Uri Boness mentioned that he was doing something around search, and I got to know Steven, who was leading it. Steven and myself immediately hit it off. You see, Steven and myself think very much alike, yet still differently. It’s a rare combination that doesn’t happen frequently, but when it does, exciting things happen. And to top it all, Steven comes with an extensive track record when it comes to Open Source projects. When I learned that Simon Willnauer, one of Lucene rock stars is part of the team as well, the inevitable conclusion was not that hard to make. It Just Felt Right.

So, I am extremely happy to announce that we now have an Elasticsearch company, your basic one stop shop for anything to do with Elasticsearch. What does it mean? It means that we can basically move Elasticsearch harder, faster, better, and stronger, while providing all the services you might expect from an Open Source company.

On top of that, the Elasticsearch team also includes Nick White (the finance wizard), as the CFO. Chris Male, and Martijn van Groningen, both amazingly talented developers and Lucene committers, and the valuable Elissa Nancarrow to handle, well, basically everything else. With the future holding additional talented people joining the company (and if you are up to it, we are hiring!), it really feels like we are on our way to build something really special.

I still vividly remember 10 years ago sitting in a one room apartment in London, with no job, first getting into the search space by writing “iCook” for my wife while she was studying to be a Chef at the Cordon Bleu. Its been a long journey to get to this point, yet it feels like it has just begun…

Steven’s Post
Uri’s Post
Simon’s Post

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Today is a great day for the Elasticsearch project, all Elasticsearch users, open source in general and not in the least for my colleague, fellow company founder and originator of Elasticsearch – Shay Banon. Today is the day we launch the company behind Elasticsearch! In practice, this means that as of today, users and potential users of Elasticsearch have a definitive source for support, education and guidance with respect to developing, deploying and running Elasticsearch in production environments.

Shay and I connected though a mutual acquaintance (company co-founder Uri Boness) and started to share ideas about setting up a company around Elasticsearch. As it turned out, Shay and I shared a vision of creating an innovative company that will really make a difference in the Big Data space, and is focused 100% at creating products that truly meet the needs of users. With my background as co-founder of SpringSource, the company behind the popular Spring Framework, open source was an obvious ingredient of course. It didn’t take us long come to the conclusion that cooperating on serving customers and helping companies make successful use of Elasticsearch made a lot of sense. Only months later we setup a company that is committed to the success of Elasticsearch users and that is committed to open source. We take these commitments very seriously. I am therefore very pleased to state that Elasticsearch will also make contributions to the Apache Lucene project, which is for obvious reasons an open source project that’s very close to our hearts. All the more reason for me to also be extremely excited of having one of the leaders of the Apache Lucene project, Simon Willnauer, as a co-founder of the company and technology leader on my team.

Moving forward, Shay will continue to develop Elasticsearch, and will continue to develop a solution that’s exactly what users want and what users need. As of right now, he has a whole team to back him up. During the next few months we will be adding talented Elasticsearch colleagues to the team, so if you’re interested in being part of a great team of technologists in the big data search and analytics space, feel free to drop us a line!

I truly look forward to working together with my wonderful team towards the continued success of Elasticsearch. It’s going to be great.

Cheers,
Steven Schuurman, CEO

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