Elastic announced the promotion of Ashutosh (Ash) Kulkarni to CEO and his nomination to the Board of Directors.
Kulkarni will succeed Founder and CEO Shay Banon, who reassumes the role of CTO, and will continue to serve on the Board of Directors.
Banon, who served as CTO prior to being named CEO five years ago, stepped down from his role as Chairman of the Board. Chetan Puttagunta, currently Lead Independent Director, has been appointed Chairman.
"... I've seen him in action for the past year and I know that his focused and empathetic leadership style combined with his executional and operational excellence will enable him to successfully lead Elastic," said Shay Banon, CTO, Elastic. "Elastic is my life's work, and in my role as CTO, I'll be laser-focused on innovation and product, and people and culture - where my greatest passions lie, while Ash leads Elastic to realize its full potential. Our continued partnership will bring our employees, customers, and community the best of both worlds."
"Ash's success driving the growth of Elastic's cloud business and building strong relationships across the entire Elastic customer base made his promotion to CEO a natural choice for the Board," said Chetan Puttagunta, Chairman and Lead Independent Director, Elastic. "The Board unanimously chose Ash after seeing the exceptional product innovations and customer growth he delivered over the past year."
Since joining Elastic as Chief Product Officer in January 2021, Kulkarni has been the architect of Elastic's growing focus on its Cloud business, and of the strategy behind its solutions in the areas of Observability, Security, and Enterprise Search. He has brought a renewed emphasis on user experience and customer success, especially with a view to helping drive frictionless growth in the cloud.
Prior to Elastic, Kulkarni held senior product leadership and management roles at McAfee, Akamai, Informatica, and Sun Microsystems.
"... We have a tremendous opportunity ahead of us as the markets we operate in continue to grow, and as the volume and complexity of data continues to explode. From Observability and Security to Enterprise Search, Elastic is helping thousands of customers use the power of search to extract value from their data in more intuitive ways than ever before. And Elastic Cloud is helping them do this with greater scale, speed, and relevance than ever before." said Ashutosh Kulkarni, CEO, Elastic.
Separately, Paul Appleby, has stepped down from his role as president, worldwide field operations, and will be leaving Elastic. "I want to thank Shay for the tremendous opportunity to be a part of Elastic's exceptional growth and extend my warm congratulations to Ash on his promotion to CEO," said Paul Appleby. "I am proud of the team we have built, and am confident that they will help Elastic continue its rapid march forward. I am committed to a successful transition."
Kulkarni added, "We have a strong team, and I have confidence in our chief sales officer, Michael Cremen, as well as in our product leadership, and know that we will continue executing to our highest standards even as we start a search for a chief product officer to take over my prior day-to-day responsibilities."
The Latest
Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...
For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...
Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...
Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...
For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...
New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...
Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ...
In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...
When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...