DATABASES<\/p>\n
CEO says automation is enabling leaner teams as engineering is split into three core areas<\/p>\n
Elastic, whose products include Elasticsearch and Kibana, has announced an “approximately” 7 percent reduction in its workforce.<\/p>\n
In a blog post<\/a>, 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Last month, Elastic announced<\/a> its Q4 FY 2026 figures, which included a total revenue of $451 million, an increase of 16 percent year-over-year.<\/p>\n It’s been an interesting few years for Elastic. In 2021, the company announced<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n The reaction was swift: Amazon Web Services (AWS) forked<\/a> Elasticsearch and Kibana, calling it OpenSearch. OpenSearch was later transferred<\/a> to the Linux Foundation.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In 2024, shortly before the transfer of OpenSearch, Elastic announced<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n