The fact that they grew despite Amazon doesn't mean that AWS Elasticsearch wasn't a viable competitor. It just means that at the moment it was not an existential threat.
However, when competing with a literally A in FAANG, one must be very careful about writing them off.
To compare, I knew a company that 10 years ago made really great business intelligence integrations into Excel. They'd operated for 15+ years and were a major local employer. They thought Palantir was going to be their competitor, but then Microsoft came out with Power BI.
At first, revenue grew because Microsoft's marketing shined a great spotlight on the field (plus MS had only entered because the field was growing in the first place). Then as the situation matured, MS's capacity to offer integrations to the rest of the stack became a key sales point.
Like AWS, the point of investing in their stack isn't one particular product but the fact that all the billing, support, and integrations happen via one company.
You can even accept it if any particular product is deficient (e.g., some say that about Teams or Skype), but in the case of an open-source product like Elastic--the value of the software itself is 100% the same.
AWS was going to eventually kill Elastic. Not just because of all I wrote above, but also because Elastic's got a significant part of its revenue by selling Elastic as a distribution on top of AWS. Anyone would want to cut out the middleman and simply use AWS's version even if it lagged behind the current Elastic.
I'd have more sympathy for that viewpoint if Elastic didn't start off by using the open source community before switching to a proprietary license. The never would have gotten to the level where they mattered if it wasn't for being open source, and turning their back on that community makes them the bad guys.
A small history tidbit is that AWS has been offering ES service since 2015, while Elastic launched Elastic Cloud in 2016, after acquiring Found (a ES SaaS company) in 2015.
However, when competing with a literally A in FAANG, one must be very careful about writing them off.
To compare, I knew a company that 10 years ago made really great business intelligence integrations into Excel. They'd operated for 15+ years and were a major local employer. They thought Palantir was going to be their competitor, but then Microsoft came out with Power BI.
At first, revenue grew because Microsoft's marketing shined a great spotlight on the field (plus MS had only entered because the field was growing in the first place). Then as the situation matured, MS's capacity to offer integrations to the rest of the stack became a key sales point.
Like AWS, the point of investing in their stack isn't one particular product but the fact that all the billing, support, and integrations happen via one company.
You can even accept it if any particular product is deficient (e.g., some say that about Teams or Skype), but in the case of an open-source product like Elastic--the value of the software itself is 100% the same.
AWS was going to eventually kill Elastic. Not just because of all I wrote above, but also because Elastic's got a significant part of its revenue by selling Elastic as a distribution on top of AWS. Anyone would want to cut out the middleman and simply use AWS's version even if it lagged behind the current Elastic.