Out of curiosity, did you pursue a rev share model with Elastic (Co) for your Elastic managed service? I guess that's not something thay can be discussed openly but recognizing you probably had 10x their revenue in the managed service and another 10x their revenue in compute behind the OSS, I wonder if there could have been a proactive happy middle ground found years ago.
I suppose that they might not have accepted something that was too small percent wise and hence might have preferred to go head to head no matter where that might have gone.
My real sense for why they've struggled to out maneuver is their lack of execution on their managed service (9 years in market, still minority of their revenue); while you had a head start and I'm sure that's what they point to as preventing execution, if they had really focused there they might be more like Confluent in terms of being considered the well regarded SaaS leader in their segment.
But I do think it'd be a good look for AWS to proactively help these companies. I didn't think the approach taken with Grafana Labs was right... that looked more like a Faustian bargain to an outside observer (e.g. we'll cut you down at your knees and directly compete but offer you their more expensive version on our paper. It looked incredibly humiliating).
I suppose that they might not have accepted something that was too small percent wise and hence might have preferred to go head to head no matter where that might have gone.
My real sense for why they've struggled to out maneuver is their lack of execution on their managed service (9 years in market, still minority of their revenue); while you had a head start and I'm sure that's what they point to as preventing execution, if they had really focused there they might be more like Confluent in terms of being considered the well regarded SaaS leader in their segment.
But I do think it'd be a good look for AWS to proactively help these companies. I didn't think the approach taken with Grafana Labs was right... that looked more like a Faustian bargain to an outside observer (e.g. we'll cut you down at your knees and directly compete but offer you their more expensive version on our paper. It looked incredibly humiliating).