DATABASES
CEO says automation is enabling leaner teams as engineering is split into three core areas
Elastic, whose products include Elasticsearch and Kibana, has announced an "approximately" 7 percent reduction in its workforce.
In a blog post, CEO Ash Kulkarni thanked employees for their hard work as he announced the layoffs. He stated that the customer-facing sales team would continue to grow, but for others, "advances in AI and automation are letting us operate with leaner teams."
Kulkarni also noted that engineering, "where the nature of the work is evolving fastest," would be split into three core areas, each led by a senior leader who will report directly to him.
Last month, Elastic announced its Q4 FY 2026 figures, which included a total revenue of $451 million, an increase of 16 percent year-over-year.
It's been an interesting few years for Elastic. In 2021, the company announced the adoption of the Server Side Public License (SSPL) in an effort to stop cloud providers from offering its software as a service. It had formerly used the more permissive Apache 2.0 license.
The reaction was swift: Amazon Web Services (AWS) forked Elasticsearch and Kibana, calling it OpenSearch. OpenSearch was later transferred to the Linux Foundation.
For those who haven't come across the company's wares, Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine, and Kibana is a data visualization tool.
In 2024, shortly before the transfer of OpenSearch, Elastic announced that it was adding the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL) as an option. CTO Shay Banon said at the time: "I am so happy to be able to call Elasticsearch Open Source again."
Kulkarni said: "The industry is changing. Advances in AI, automation, and technology are reshaping how work gets done, and we're changing with them." Part of the change, it appears, is laying off a chunk of the workforce.
"We're shifting our pace of innovation," he stated, "simplifying how we operate, and investing in new skills. That's what this reorganization is for: a simpler structure, with fewer layers, less complexity, and less friction."
In its last 10-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company stated it had a total of 4,019 employees. Slightly less than 300 Elasticians stand to be shown the door depending on what "approximately 7 percent" ends up being.
In its SEC 8-K filing [PDF] last night, the company said in addition to the 7 percent workforce reduction, it "plans to continue hiring in key strategic areas and locations, including continuing to grow headcount in customer-facing go-to-market functions." It said that overall, it expects "total headcount to grow this fiscal year compared to last fiscal year."
The Register asked Elastic for a breakdown of the figures, and will update this piece should the company provide more information. ®