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Laurent Mechain, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Elastic, joins the Ultimate Guide to Partnering.
With an impressive background in cloud technology and strategic alliances, Laurent Mechain brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the role of VP of Strategic Alliances at Elastic. Laurent has played a crucial role in driving the company’s success in the highly competitive cloud industry, rising to Pinnacle Partner Status with all three Hyperscalers..
The Journey of Laurent Mechain
Laurent Mechain, originally from France, has spent almost 20 years in the U.S. After 17 years at Microsoft and a significant stint at AWS, he joined Elastic four years ago. Today, Laurent leads Elastic’s Strategic Alliances team, focusing on partnerships with hyperscalers. His journey in cloud computing and his role at Elastic provide a unique perspective on the industry’s evolution.
Elastic’s Mission: Empowering Through Data
Elastic is a company that enables organizations to find answers with data at speed and scale. They focus on making the most of all data, using the power of search, AI, and analytics. Elastic offers out-of-the-box solutions for observability and security and a customizable search platform. Their mission is to help customers extract real-time insights from their data, enhancing operational efficiency and security.
Evolution of Search: From Keywords to Relevance
Traditional keyword search is no longer sufficient in today’s data-driven world. Laurent explains the shift towards semantic search, which connects context to provide more relevant and accurate results. This evolution emphasizes relevance over mere keyword matching, enabling users to get higher-quality answers to their queries. Elastic’s search technology leverages AI to enhance this relevance, making it a powerful tool for businesses.
Recognized Excellence: Awards and Partnerships
Elastic’s success is highlighted by its recognition as a partner of the year by all three hyperscalers: Microsoft, Google, and AWS. This distinction underscores Elastic’s integrations’ quality and ability to create unique, market-leading solutions. Laurent attributes their success to three key factors: building strong integrations, effective go-to-market strategies, and robust customer engagement.
The Power of Data: Driving Business Transformation
Data is at the heart of modern business transformation. Laurent shares insights on how data drives customer experiences, operational resilience, and security. With the exponential growth of data, businesses need advanced tools to make sense of it. Elastic’s platform, combining search and AI, is designed to extract valuable insights from vast amounts of data, helping businesses stay competitive and innovative.
Innovation at Elastic: Leading the AI Revolution
Elastic is at the forefront of integrating AI into its search capabilities. They were early adopters of machine learning and have seamlessly integrated large, publicly trained models with private enterprise data. This combination ensures that data remains secure while leveraging the power of AI to provide insightful results. Laurent highlights Elastic’s continuous innovation, including new technologies like the Elasticsearch relevance engine and AI-powered search assistance.
Marketplace Strategy: Meeting Customers Where They Are
Elastic’s marketplace-first initiative has significantly boosted its cloud business. They have seen tremendous growth by ensuring customers can buy, deploy, and manage Elastic solutions through cloud marketplaces. Laurent shares that in 2021, less than 10% of their cloud business was transacted via marketplaces. By the last quarter, this figure had jumped to 47%, showcasing their successful strategy in aligning with customer purchasing preferences.
Looking Ahead: Embracing Future Opportunities
As data continues to grow and AI technology advances, Elastic is poised to remain a leader in the cloud industry. Laurent’s insights into the evolving landscape highlight the importance of innovation, strategic partnerships, and a customer-centric approach. Elastic’s commitment to empowering organizations through data and AI will undoubtedly drive their continued success in the future.
Conclusion: Lessons from a Cloud Pioneer
Laurent Machan’s journey and Elastic’s achievements offer valuable lessons for any business aiming to excel in the cloud industry. Organizations can unlock new opportunities and drive significant growth by focusing on innovation, building strong partnerships, and leveraging data and AI. Stay tuned to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering for more insights from industry leaders shaping the future of technology.
Tune in to this episode to learn more about Laurent Mechain’s vision for Elastic and how the company is shaping the future of cloud technology and search.
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What You’ll Learn
- The Power of Relevance in Search: Laurent shares insights on how Elastic is transforming search with AI and semantic technology.
- Building Strong Cloud Partnerships: Discussion on Elastic’s strategies for creating successful integrations and go-to-market initiatives with hyperscalers.
- Leveraging Data for Success: The importance of data in driving customer value and operational efficiency.
- The Value of Multidisciplinary Teams: Insights into how diverse roles within a team contribute to success in strategic alliances.
Quotes from Laurent
“Relevance in search is about connecting contexts to bring quality answers to complex queries.”
“Elastic’s mission is to enable real-time data insights, helping customers make the most of their data.”
“Success in the cloud marketplace is driven by strong integrations, collaborative go-to-market strategies, and effective sales execution.”
Transcript – Created by Adobe AI
00;00;00;00 – 00;00;31;29
Vince
Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzione your host, and my mission is to empower leaders like you to achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. At the ultimate Guide to partnering, we bring you the leaders driving this transformation the best in the business and the award winning partners. Today, I’m excited to spotlight one of the pinnacle partners in our industry and one of its leaders. Lauren Machan is the VP of Cloud at Elastic, an award winning partner on all three of the hyperscalers.
00;00;32;02 – 00;00;33;18
Vince
Lauren, welcome to the podcast.
00;00;33;25 – 00;00;35;12
Laurent
Thank you Vince. Very happy to be here.
00;00;35;13 – 00;00;39;28
Vince
So excited to have you in the studio here in Boca Raton. Yeah, all the way from Seattle.
00;00;39;28 – 00;00;45;06
Laurent
It’s lovely hot and warm in in Florida, back to Washington State. But it’s great to be here.
00;00;45;07 – 00;00;49;21
Vince
Well, we want to talk about the weather, but you do have great summer weather in Washington state.
00;00;49;22 – 00;00;52;09
Laurent
Yeah, from July 4th until Labor Day.
00;00;52;10 – 00;01;10;02
Vince
Yeah. July 5th. Every Wednesday after 4th of July gets the highs out. Well, you know, you and I got to know each other a little bit better this year. you participated with me. We had the privilege of having you join me in a cloud marketplace conversation at the Channel Partners event. That was back in March already? Can’t believe it.
00;01;10;02 – 00;01;31;27
Vince
Yeah. we were supported by, Google. Devo from Google. Ryan Walsh from, pax8. And yourself for this conversation, really, about helping organizations better understand marketplace moment and how they need to lean in. And these were organizations that are not really in the hyperscaler world or in the purview that we talk about, but just that really rich conversation that we had.
00;01;31;27 – 00;01;35;04
Vince
So I’m really glad that you and I get this time for this deep dive today.
00;01;35;06 – 00;01;36;14
Laurent
Thank you.
00;01;36;17 – 00;01;50;03
Vince
Your organization is, an incredible organization. We’ll talk more about your rise to success. But first, for our viewers and for our listeners, maybe a little bit more about you, your role and elastic.
00;01;50;06 – 00;02;09;09
Laurent
Yeah. So thank you. So thank you. I’m great to be here. I’m lovely to to spend a few minutes with you today. so my name is in French people. Amisha in English people say Laurent, we train. you pick the one you want. I’ve been, you know, I’ve been living in the US for almost 20 years now, so I know that my accent will never go away.
00;02;09;12 – 00;02;41;00
Laurent
but, you know, I worked I work in cloud companies for a very long time. I worked, spend almost 17 years at Microsoft. Got the chance to work at AWS. and joined elastic about four years ago today, what we call the strategic Alliances team, which includes, of course, the partnership with hyperscalers. elastic is you know, I try to keep it simple for as we get started, but what we do is we enable everyone to find the answers that they need with data at speed and at scale.
00;02;41;02 – 00;02;54;28
Laurent
So we able to enable customers to really make the most of all their data and sign real time answers to the questions using the power of search, AI and analytics. And I know we’re going to talk about more about this today and especially around AI.
00;02;55;00 – 00;03;02;01
Vince
And what is different about Elastic view on search and what you do and your customer persona than just general search as we know it today.
00;03;02;03 – 00;03;20;28
Laurent
Well, I think, you know, general search, what we used to know is around keyword search. Yeah. You know, you you go online, you say, okay, let’s search something. But cause, you know, a car or a, a device that you want to buy. And the search has been for long term, anchored around or on just keyword search.
00;03;20;28 – 00;03;21;15
Vince
Yes.
00;03;21;18 – 00;03;43;20
Laurent
But it’s not enough. I think today people want more. It’s not just about search is what I call relevance. Relevance. Today it’s more relevance than just search. and when you think about what relevance you think about what it semantic search, when you can start in connecting context, we will discover to bring much more, better response, to to a customer search.
00;03;43;22 – 00;03;56;02
Laurent
in a more complex way. Like you need to be able to search in your own language, you know, for English like I do. but you need to able to do this with something that brings more and more quality of answers to your your queries.
00;03;56;02 – 00;04;00;27
Vince
And what and what are the typical use cases and personas of people that use your platform?
00;04;00;29 – 00;04;26;08
Laurent
Well, we, we have two ways to use elastic today. the first one is we have what I call out of the box solutions that customers use every day. The first one is around elastic. It’s called elastic observability. So people use it for functional use cases like log analytics, like, application performance monitoring, like metrics. all of this is around the domain of observability.
00;04;26;08 – 00;04;32;19
Laurent
And that’s the first use case. But when customers choose to use elastic, that’s usually the one that we see the most adoption and.
00;04;32;21 – 00;04;35;01
Vince
The buying personas in the technology sector.
00;04;35;01 – 00;04;57;02
Laurent
Yeah. It’s yeah, it’s, you know, most of all users are all technologies developers, you know, DevOps, security operations. We are in this in this technical space, of a second out of the box solution that we have is around security. Okay. You know, what we call security information and event management Siem, you know, endpoint management of all the security data points that you can collect with.
00;04;57;06 – 00;05;32;26
Laurent
So we have two our out-of-the-box solutions which customers can bring the data into elastic. And the third component which is more AI, a platform. It’s search, and customers can use elastic to really build and custom vis such applications. And we have hundreds of customers that started with this. You know, this is what historical platform. You know, when we were born about 12 years ago, it’s, you know, to build a, you know, or a vendor, you know, couldn’t find an application to help you find a recipe on the internet and decided to write an application for this.
00;05;32;28 – 00;05;35;09
Laurent
And it’s because such was born.
00;05;35;12 – 00;05;45;01
Vince
So, you know, we talk about AI, the role of AI, the importance of AI, this AI moment. How is what you do differently, or are you embedding AI into this as well?
00;05;45;04 – 00;06;05;07
Laurent
Well, we we’ve been we because search and data is what we do. We’ve been it’s it’s been a very easy transition. Yeah. And we were able to react very quickly to what you know the with the transformative AI revolution that happened about what, 18 months ago. Right. you know, we we’ve been using machine learning, you know, technologies for a long time.
00;06;05;09 – 00;06;30;26
Laurent
But the core of a technology, what we call Elasticsearch, has been AI ready for a long time. But really, what we do today, you know, in the world of AI, is combining the large, publicly trained model with people. So now we run the, you know, Chronicle last week at Microsoft called the, you know, the, or domain specific language models with the data that customers bring into Elasticsearch.
00;06;30;26 – 00;06;45;11
Laurent
We don’t want this data to be in the public domain. So we we use via the power of elastic to combine enterprise data in a secure way with a power arms. And that’s something that we’ve been ready from, from for many years.
00;06;45;16 – 00;07;21;01
Vince
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00;07;21;01 – 00;07;43;16
Vince
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00;07;43;18 – 00;08;05;19
Vince
So you’ve been recognized by all three hyperscalers. I think this might be a distinction. I don’t know if any others have this distinction. As an as an ISV independent software vendor, but multiple times now you’ve been partner of the year, award winner, Microsoft partner, your award winner, Google’s partner, AWS, each of them multiple times. Now tell us a bit more about that success and what you believe it takes to be an award winning partner.
00;08;05;24 – 00;08;32;10
Laurent
Well, first of all, I it’s always an honor to be, to be recognized by by APIs kiddos. I know we it speaks volumes to the to the quality of engagement we have. but the way we, we look at it is across three dimensions. the first one is around what I call the build side is we want to build the best integration with first party services.
00;08;32;12 – 00;08;54;20
Laurent
We want to create integrations that are differentiated, unique, uniquely positioned to a market that creates via. So something but not every competitor as as with elastic between elastic and the cloud providers. I think we’ve done this extremely well with Microsoft over the years. We are natively integrated in the Azure console. and we are inspiring to do this.
00;08;54;20 – 00;09;23;16
Laurent
And we did that by using Google Cloud. the second level is really around the how we create this differentiation into better to give a story. so it’s the market side, you know, how we go to market with the APIs is, this is where you where we work with marketing teams, and the first dimension is with more with the product teams, and how we create this, the demand engine around, around this differentiation that developed in the first place.
00;09;23;18 – 00;09;40;04
Laurent
But at the end of the day, the rubber hits the road when we sell it together. and then we go together to our customers, and when we, we bring the value of elastic cloud running on, on any of these clouds, and turn this into growth engines for both, for all companies.
00;09;40;06 – 00;09;59;29
Vince
You know, we’ve been talking about two tectonic shifts, this one third of $1 trillion in durable cloud budgets. Now, it’s astounding. Right. And you and I were both at Microsoft at the same time. We were talking about the earlier about the bomber years in the South, in the Dell years and and the build years. what are you seeing now that’s different?
00;10;00;02 – 00;10;10;14
Vince
during this time in this marketplace opportunity, this huge untapped market. I know you’re on a tear. You just recently had an earnings report and it was very successful. So tell tell us more about what you’re seeing. What’s your view.
00;10;10;15 – 00;10;31;04
Laurent
Here? Well, I think you know, there’s something that’s driving all of this is data. I think customers what do you think about all the, just the problems that customers are trying to solve today? It’s all goes to data, you know, data for elevating customer experiences, data for improving operational resiliency. Yes. Data for, you know, mitigating security risk.
00;10;31;05 – 00;10;32;18
Vince
Just thinking about that. Right.
00;10;32;20 – 00;10;51;26
Laurent
So number one, yeah. You know, when you think about data, you know, I was reading something from IDC the other day. IDC predicts buy in by the end of 2025. Each day, 400 exabytes of data will be produced every day around the world. And I can’t even tell you guys how much data that is.
00;10;51;26 – 00;10;55;03
Vince
How often are we doubling now? Our data?
00;10;55;05 – 00;10;56;03
Laurent
I don’t know, but it.
00;10;56;03 – 00;10;58;07
Vince
Used to take years. Yeah, I used to take yours.
00;10;58;07 – 00;11;24;15
Laurent
Yeah. Yeah. So? So you can’t make sense of this data. We’ve just what you have today. And this is where generative AI and the AI comes into play. You can’t really extract the value and insights of this data without the help of AI and search. And this is where we are uniquely positioned. You know, I mean, you yesterday during the conference, you talked about 100 million, 300 million users of ChatGPT in less than two months.
00;11;24;17 – 00;11;42;27
Laurent
You know, we talked about the the hundreds of millions of jobs that are going to be disrupted by, I mean, and the hundreds of millions of new opportunities that’s going to seize market. And. Right, you know, all this technology shift that we’re going to see around productivity, automation, all of this creates a need, to for everybody to react.
00;11;42;27 – 00;12;11;14
Laurent
You know, we, I was blown away. but the amount of innovation I saw from Google Cloud at the next conference in April, and what Microsoft announced at build last week, and really, for, for partners, it’s really about, being being ready to adopt to, to embrace these challenges. They’ll be able to, to transform, quickly, and for elastic, you know, it comes around a few things is innovation.
00;12;11;14 – 00;12;33;17
Laurent
First, you know, we are a product company or a technology company. so we focus on innovation, you know, we we launch, we announce or first integrations or engineer. You know, in April last year, I, during Microsoft Build, in 2023, we were to announce some integrations with Azure, OpenAI, and since then, it’s been a, you know, incredible focus for the company.
00;12;33;19 – 00;12;59;14
Laurent
You know, in the in the past 12 months, we announced new technologies like which we got something of Elasticsearch relevance engine. You know, I was talking about combining the power of publicly trained data with private data versus whatever, you know, customers to do this. We don’t run assistance. So now for observability and security or two out of a box solution, customers can use AI assistance to accelerate the resolution of their, you know, other voice search with elastic.
00;12;59;17 – 00;13;15;24
Laurent
we, it’s just it doesn’t stop. we announced new query languages called elastic, Query Language SDK. to really, accelerate the, finding and creating data. You know, we’ve all of the volume of data we have.
00;13;15;24 – 00;13;19;22
Vince
Is that for it? Would you embed that in your code as an example? Would you use that query?
00;13;19;27 – 00;13;38;12
Laurent
Yeah, yeah. Just of customers can use it. And this is something that we asked for years to in order for us to recreate the data in a faster way. And but for us also, it’s not just about the, you know, how we address these challenges. It’s not just about the product side. No. We’ve talked about marketplaces before and those success with marketplaces.
00;13;38;12 – 00;14;03;04
Laurent
And, you know, we, we created this marketplace first initiative at Elastic a few years ago. And it’s a company wide effort, you know, from from product to finance to sales to multi partner and marketing, because we wanted to make sure that we could meet customers where they want to buy, deploy and manage elastic. we, you know, just to give you, some, some figures that led to some of your worlds.
00;14;03;04 – 00;14;17;16
Laurent
We just talked about, you know, in, in 2021, less than 10% of all cloud business, Elastic Cloud was transacted via cloud marketplaces in the last quarter, which we, we reported yesterday, during earnings, we were at 47%.
00;14;17;17 – 00;14;24;16
Vince
47%. So you’re in the top, top of the tier there really, because we’re talking about organizations getting into past that 20% threshold.
00;14;24;23 – 00;14;29;27
Laurent
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we got there by, you know, by thinking about a very simple winning formula.
00;14;30;00 – 00;14;30;23
Vince
And what is it?
00;14;30;26 – 00;14;52;06
Laurent
Well, we want, you know, we want us to sell all cloud offerings. I think this is where customers get the most value for investments into elastic. that’s for elastic sellers. for hyperscalers sellers, it’s sort of bots, you know, so selling cloud and selling cloud commitments to their own customers and we know what the total backlog, what we call, you know, total spend commitments from hyperscalers.
00;14;52;06 – 00;14;57;22
Laurent
No friend with $40 billion. and I think it’s it grew almost 50% since last year.
00;14;57;22 – 00;15;00;06
Vince
Yes.
00;15;00;08 – 00;15;23;24
Laurent
so when you, when you sell cloud, and it retires commitment. What is the best place to to buy this for customers is via marketplaces. Because marketplaces bring some benefits about burning down these commitments. Yeah. So it’s a winning formula for customers because we have retail. You have a commitment to burn it down. It’s for hyperscalers because it drive consumption and for elastic because we sell cloud offering.
00;15;23;26 – 00;15;28;16
Vince
And how do you drive more consumption of the cloud. Because because of all the data that’s involved in it. Yeah.
00;15;28;16 – 00;15;48;05
Laurent
Yeah. For us it’s a very simple model for customers. They pay we don’t service solutions one by one. You know customers invest in elastic. We paid on resources and and and and storage and data. So it’s more about the resources they need to run all their workloads more than you. The use cases that we that we deploy elastic for.
00;15;48;10 – 00;15;53;17
Vince
Yeah. And and you have the ability to just work on, on public data as well as their enterprise data.
00;15;53;17 – 00;16;12;24
Laurent
That is correct. So elastic you know we ingest of the data we bring into elastic which is the starting point can come from any sources. it can come from from on premise, which, you know, we were we’re not born on the cloud company. You know, when we’re born in 2012, we know a lot of the usage was on prem, and we still have a lot of customers using on prem.
00;16;12;24 – 00;16;31;20
Laurent
I think, you know, yesterday we we share that about 40 to 44% of revenue comes from cloud. So we almost had a 50% market. Yeah. but you know we see more and more cloud adoption as well. Interesting. Across all cloud. So customers can use elastic a single customers can have sources of data coming from on prem or any clouds of their choice.
00;16;31;22 – 00;16;52;27
Vince
So fantastic growth and trajectory of your organization. We have quite a few partners watching listening to this podcast. They want to learn how to get to your pinnacle level, like what advice to builders. And I refer to ISV sometimes as builders and other partners looking to accelerate their success during this incredibly transformative time. Yeah.
00;16;53;02 – 00;17;13;01
Laurent
You know, I yeah, I’m old, and sometimes I’m thinking about my maybe to learn new things is, is is is declining every year. but, I think, you know, AI and all this world transformation is going to require a lot of, a lot of reskilling. You know, I was blown away last week at Microsoft Build.
00;17;13;03 – 00;17;28;11
Laurent
I realized that I could become a developer again. You know, I was a software engineer. I went to when I graduated from school. I wasn’t very good at it. And then I realized suddenly they could write a ton of code by just, you know, speaking to a time machine. but I think there was getting it in mind is going to be, is very important.
00;17;28;11 – 00;17;52;29
Laurent
I think there’s a there’s a new partner ecosystem that’s really reforming around the AI. and the speed of transformation is, is crazy. so what does that mean is all the partners are going to reinvent themselves and and some of them already, others are not, but they’re going to reinvent themselves. All we can, you know, take, make, take benefit of all this technology that’s coming up.
00;17;53;02 – 00;18;11;16
Vince
It’s it’s fascinating time. It’s a fascinating journey that you’ve been on as well. I’d love to spend a moment. I love to have this question, discuss this question with each of my guests. as you might know, it’s a favorite question of mine. Let me do that again. I’m going to start from the beginning here, Mike.
00;18;11;18 – 00;18;28;17
Vince
So the right I’d love to pivot. I have a favorite question I’d love to ask each of my guests. you’re hosting a dinner party, and, you can host this dinner party in anywhere. Anywhere in the world. maybe Seattle in the summer. We could talk about other locations, maybe France. Yeah, south of France, but possibly.
00;18;28;23 – 00;18;29;17
Laurent
southwest of France.
00;18;29;17 – 00;18;38;24
Vince
Southwest of France. Even better. Yeah. and you can invite any three guests from the present or the past to this amazing dinner party. Whom would you invite and why?
00;18;38;27 – 00;18;53;14
Laurent
that’s a tough question, but I, you know, I if you look at me, you wouldn’t believe it, but I’m actually a sports geek. you know, I used to do lots of sports when I was young and, you know, favorite sport? favorite sports? since I moved to the US, it’s American football.
00;18;53;14 – 00;18;56;20
Vince
American football? Yeah, I bet you were going to tell me real football.
00;18;56;20 – 00;19;09;12
Laurent
No, no, I you know, I, you know, I use, I use me but soccer for a real football now. But, you know, I discovered that American football when I moved to the US and, you know, so I love sports. I’m a favorite team. Seattle Seahawks.
00;19;09;14 – 00;19;09;19
Vince
Go.
00;19;09;19 – 00;19;10;17
Laurent
Hawks.
00;19;10;19 – 00;19;16;01
Vince
you know, we’ve had Mike dovey on the podcast four times. It was the hype and, you know, Mike from your time. But I guess that’s right.
00;19;16;02 – 00;19;34;06
Laurent
Yeah. Yeah. So so I think it’s a it’s it’s a good question. I’m pretty going to stay in the domain of sports. if you don’t mind, I’m, you know, I, I think the first one that comes to mind is Muhammad Ali. You know, I think, you know, we, you know, legendary boxer, amazing career in boxing out.
00;19;34;08 – 00;19;55;05
Laurent
I remember at Microsoft, you were showing me the fight as we’ve against Joe Frazier in there in the free guy, you know, and know my you know, I think it’s that really doesn’t translate into was Ali kill him. but yeah, it was just a fantastic sports legend. But I think for me, what’s really important is all these guests that my dinner relate to my values.
00;19;55;08 – 00;20;09;21
Laurent
Yeah. I don’t want to think about Muhammad Ali. I think it was his site in during his life for justice and Equality. Yes. and this is something that not my admire for what he’s done for the African-American communities and and everything around.
00;20;09;24 – 00;20;24;00
Vince
And he fought hard over, you know, it was very unpopular war going on in the United States. A lot of young people were going over and fighting and Vietnam. Yeah. And he said, I’m not going to go. I mean, and that was, he was shot and he was shunned from his sport. His title was taken away.
00;20;24;01 – 00;20;32;23
Laurent
That’s right. It’s my fourth amazing story. So that’s my guess. Number one. Number two. And this one, you know, it’s Pete Carroll, you know. So Pete.
00;20;32;23 – 00;20;33;08
Vince
Carroll.
00;20;33;08 – 00;20;52;23
Laurent
Yeah. Some people is still with us. You know, he, he was the head coach of a Seattle Seahawks until, until last season. but I think what I like with it is not just, I mean, he brought, the first Super Bowl to Seattle. And of course, everybody was excited about this, but is mindset was always complete.
00;20;52;25 – 00;21;22;00
Laurent
Yeah. and he you wrote a book called Win Forever. and for me, this always compete is not about, you know, killing the competition. I mean, it matters when you’re a sports coach. Yes, but it’s more about the mindset you bring every day to what you do. and thinking about being always better, and always relentless about your pursuit for, you know, improving, you know, I, I have another expression for this, you know, always competition.
00;21;22;03 – 00;21;34;16
Laurent
it’s every day is an interview day. And people said, look at me and say, what do you mean? I love that? It’s it’s the mindset is about bringing your A-game every day, whether it’s about work every day, you know, you never know. You can get a phone call. You need to be on your A-game immediately.
00;21;34;16 – 00;21;35;05
Vince
Absolutely.
00;21;35;05 – 00;21;57;20
Laurent
So Peter is the second one, and the last one, I have to say, it’s something that happened just a few days ago, and, I don’t know if you know Bill Walton. Bill Walton. Oh, yes. Star. Yeah, yeah. and, you know, I, I, you know much about Bill Walton, you know, until, until recently. But my, I know someone you knew they were done extremely well.
00;21;57;23 – 00;22;24;12
Laurent
they, they work together. you know, Bill Walton was a superstar with the Portland Trail Blazers in, in, in Oregon. he brought an NBA title to the Blazers and, 1974, I believe. and but Bill, also an amazing career after basketball. And he became a sports commentator, and he became very, very famous for his t shirts.
00;22;24;15 – 00;22;43;08
Laurent
but also the way you approach, you know, life after basketball. And to me, what when I think about Bill, it’s about, you know, I, I read a lot about Bill since his passing last week, and I was really, really inspired by the way he thought about, you know, life and and fun, after basketball. Yeah.
00;22;43;08 – 00;22;44;23
Laurent
So that would be my three guests.
00;22;44;23 – 00;22;46;24
Vince
And he played for the UCLA Bruins.
00;22;46;24 – 00;22;47;14
Laurent
That’s right.
00;22;47;16 – 00;23;02;28
Vince
That’s one under John. I’m going to remember his name. Well, he played for the UCLA Bruins. Yeah. Which, what a fascinating career. Yeah. Yeah. So I love it. I can I can come along to this dinner party. Maybe I can bring dessert.
00;23;03;00 – 00;23;05;19
Laurent
Please. Please bring dessert or some French wine. You know, from.
00;23;05;19 – 00;23;06;06
Vince
The bring some from.
00;23;06;08 – 00;23;06;19
Laurent
The rich.
00;23;06;19 – 00;23;11;10
Vince
Yes. Okay. That sounds that sounds great to me. I and that is this. We’re going to be in the southwest.
00;23;11;10 – 00;23;15;28
Laurent
We’d be in the southwest. We’d have some very nice cabana meadow. yes. That’s where we’ll be.
00;23;15;28 – 00;23;28;17
Vince
And sounds fascinating. So, Laurent, I’ve so enjoyed having you as a guest here and ultimate guide to Bartering. I can’t believe we’re about to dive into the second half of the year. The first half of Microsoft’s new fiscal year.
00;23;28;17 – 00;23;29;13
Laurent
Yeah.
00;23;29;15 – 00;23;46;12
Vince
- Wow. For our viewers and listeners watching today and those they all agree and aspire to be like elastic. What would you say to them now to lean in? What do they need to do to optimize their success? Working with the hyperscalers, working with the tech giant?
00;23;46;14 – 00;24;04;03
Laurent
I think there’s two things that we, you know, I think we have to focus on is generative AI. If you’re not working on this today, you know, customers are talking about this all the time. You know, we don’t really know what we want to do with it, but we’re asking for advice about what are the use cases that we can deploy for.
00;24;04;06 – 00;24;25;27
Laurent
So we can we can use Jennifer. So I think number one is genius. And at elastic is bright right. You know, Wisconsin’s innovation. we we we can we continue to make investments in to integrations with hyperscalers. We announced new more integrations with Microsoft last week at Microsoft Build. and we’re going to continue investing in that space.
00;24;25;27 – 00;24;45;14
Laurent
So I think for for partners is when you think about how do you create incremental value around AI and generative AI, that’s number one. But you can’t do all of this. And that’s probably the second priority you’re on without cloud. and I think that, you need to think about helping customers as they’re transition to cloud. Yes.
00;24;45;16 – 00;25;07;24
Laurent
and the value that you can bring along the way, you know, I think elastic we, we’re well positioned because we already in the cloud world, we have, you know, an elastic cloud offering that we as customers can use us in an hybrid environments. But we also launched some new offerings, and we’re about to we just launched a public preview of our serverless offering.
00;25;07;25 – 00;25;24;16
Laurent
That’s going to make it even easier for customers to deploy elastic. So if customers want to try elastic today, they can go to elastic that’s you. And sign up for public preview of Elastic Serverless. but I think for or for all partners is about, it’s about cloud adoption along the way.
00;25;24;18 – 00;25;32;06
Vince
And I’m reading, constant innovation. You’re in a constant innovation cycle at elastic. And so what I’m hearing loud and clear from this conversation.
00;25;32;10 – 00;25;33;20
Laurent
Yes. Absolutely. Yeah.
00;25;33;22 – 00;25;38;21
Vince
So iterate, continue to pivot. Continue to iterate release release release. Yeah.
00;25;38;23 – 00;25;51;19
Laurent
And we have a we have a platform for this. I think we’ve been building up this over the years. So I think we’ll transition was pretty easier than other partners. But that’s a new rule of the game. And it’s a fantastic and exciting, road ahead.
00;25;51;22 – 00;26;08;05
Vince
So we didn’t ask this question, but I’m going to ask it now. Like, what is the secret sauce to getting to this award winning partner? Like what was there? Was there a secret sauce in the in the mix or what? What was really what really did you do differently that others didn’t do?
00;26;08;07 – 00;26;28;06
Laurent
I think it’s, it’s it’s a, it’s a company wide effort. Yeah. You know, I always, you know, I always wait for the, the moment I’m going to get a slack message from we’ll see you and says, why did we miss this announcement from Microsoft, Google Cloud, AWS and it happened a few times. and I think this is with sprints.
00;26;28;07 – 00;26;53;14
Laurent
Let’s focus on building the best possible engagement with all the cloud providers. and it starts from the C-suite, from CEO, CPO, CFO, CSOs. Yeah. So all of these functions are critical for success. You know, as I said, we operate across three pillars of build, market and sell. Yep. but we also governance, you know, we understand the, the how much your success and how we’re going to measure it.
00;26;53;16 – 00;27;08;28
Laurent
we, we, and we inspect the qualities of success, and we course correct when we need it. and we have a full commitment from the entire company to, to this. And I think that’s not just partnerships today is people say, well, it’s the alliances team at elastic. It’s the Ontario.
00;27;08;28 – 00;27;12;28
Vince
Company, the entire company, I love it. It’s core to your mission.
00;27;13;01 – 00;27;14;22
Laurent
I’ll just percents you know the amount.
00;27;14;24 – 00;27;39;23
Vince
It has been a pleasure to have you as a guest and ultimate guide to partnering. And so glad to have you join us here in Boca Raton for our event, and also to stay an extra day for our spotlight session. I want to thank our listeners and viewers for supporting Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Benson, and as you know, my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results by having leaders like Lauren come to tell their story and how you can achieve your greatest results.
00;27;39;25 – 00;28;01;10
Vince
If you like the podcast, please subscribe and thank you again for your support, for listening, for watching The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Hopefully this episode and all the episodes we’ve recorded are helping you better align your partner strategy to achieve your greatest results. So I want to ask you something.
00;28;01;13 – 00;28;30;28
Vince
Have you implemented everything you’ve been learning, and are you now achieving the growth and revenue objectives that you hope to achieve? If not, it’s time to take action now. Join Ultimate Partner Experience. We’re building the community I’ve always dreamed about with you. You get access to exclusive industry insights, unparalleled networking opportunities, tons of educational resources, and support from a community that shares your goals.
00;28;31;00 – 00;28;46;10
Vince
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