VMware as a Blockchain Infrastructure Provider

Blockchain technology attracted a wave of enterprise experimentation in the late 2010s, with organizations ranging from global retailers to financial networks exploring distributed ledger use cases. In that environment, VMware chose the role of infrastructure enabler rather than end-application builder — a strategy sometimes called the “picks and shovels” approach, after the gold-rush analogy of selling tools to miners rather than mining yourself.

Rather than rushing to market with a product, VMware began by conducting internal research. “We basically did a lot of research in the blockchain space,” said Pratima Rao Gluckman, VMware’s blockchain engineering lead. “We have a fantastic research team at VMware who basically went off and came up with a scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol. That is pretty much the foundation of our blockchain — it is our platform.”

Byzantine Fault Tolerance: The Technical Foundation

Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is a property of distributed systems that allows them to reach consensus even when some nodes behave incorrectly or maliciously. It is a critical requirement for permissioned enterprise blockchain networks, where participants may be trusted but not unconditionally so, and where network partitions and node failures must not halt the system.

VMware’s research team developed a variant called SBFT (Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus). A research paper co-authored by members of VMware’s research team, published on arxiv.org, described SBFT as “a state of the art Byzantine fault tolerant permissioned blockchain system that addresses the challenges of scalability, decentralization and world-scale geo-replication.”

Project Concord: VMware’s Open-Source Distributed Trust Infrastructure

In August 2018, VMware open-sourced its SBFT implementation under the name Project Concord. According to VMware’s announcement at the time, Project Concord is “an open source distributed trust infrastructure” that “uses Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols to deliver a functioning distributed trust system: one that is both ‘safe’ and ‘alive.'”

The two properties VMware highlighted — safety and liveness — are standard formal requirements in distributed systems design:

• Safety: The system never returns an incorrect result; all honest nodes agree on the same state.
• Liveness: The system continues to make progress and does not get stuck indefinitely, even under partial failure.

Gluckman emphasized that Project Concord is designed to run across heterogeneous infrastructure: “We also make sure that you can run these Concord nodes in a decentralized manner across many different cloud providers and on-premise data centers.” This multi-cloud, hybrid deployment model is particularly relevant for large enterprises that cannot commit all workloads to a single cloud vendor.

The VMware Blockchain Service for Enterprise Consortiums

Building on Project Concord, VMware developed a managed VMware Blockchain Service aimed at enterprise consortiums — groups of organizations that need to share a ledger without any single participant acting as the sole authority.

The core value proposition, as Gluckman described it, is “building enterprise-grade decentralized trust.” This addresses a common pain point in multi-party business networks: the reluctance of participants to place unconditional trust in infrastructure controlled by a competitor or partner. By distributing trust across multiple consensus nodes — none of which individually controls the outcome — VMware’s platform offers a middle ground between a centralized database and a fully public blockchain.

“The trust is distributed across these different consensus nodes,” Gluckman explained. The analogy to Bitcoin’s architecture is instructive: Bitcoin has no single point of failure that can be compromised to alter the ledger, because consensus is spread across thousands of independent nodes. VMware applies a similar principle in a permissioned, enterprise context — fewer nodes, known participants, but still no single controlling entity.

Three Strategic Pillars: Decentralized Trust, Day-2 Operations, and Developer Experience

Gluckman outlined three focus areas that define VMware’s blockchain product direction:

1. Enterprise-grade decentralized trust — The primary mission, rooted in Project Concord’s SBFT protocol, emphasizing throughput, high-trust security, and scalability for large-scale deployments.
2. Robust day-2 operations — Ongoing management concerns such as node upgrades, monitoring, fault recovery, and consortium governance after initial deployment. This is an often-overlooked challenge in enterprise blockchain projects.
3. Developer-friendly tooling — Providing developers with the APIs, SDKs, and abstractions they need to build decentralized applications (commonly called DApps) on top of the platform without requiring deep expertise in the underlying consensus mechanisms.

“This is primarily our focus right now,” Gluckman summarized, “providing enterprise-grade decentralized trust, robust day-2 operations, and making it developer friendly so we can have as many decentralized applications that are going to be written on our blockchain.”

Notable Adoption: Facebook’s Libra and Enterprise Players

One high-profile example of VMware’s blockchain technology appearing in a broader industry initiative was Facebook’s Libra project (later rebranded Diem). According to Forbes reporting at the time, Libra incorporated a variant of HotStuff, a BFT consensus mechanism that VMware researchers helped develop. HotStuff later became influential across the broader blockchain consensus research community.

On the enterprise adoption side, major organizations including AT&T, Nestlé, and Mastercard were among the companies actively exploring blockchain applications during this period. VMware’s positioning as an infrastructure layer — rather than a competitor in any specific vertical application — allowed it to serve these enterprises without conflicting with their own product strategies.

VMware was not alone in this infrastructure role. Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Oracle all developed their own blockchain frameworks and managed services during the same period, reflecting broad industry conviction that the barrier to enterprise blockchain adoption was primarily operational complexity rather than conceptual interest.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Engineers

• VMware’s blockchain platform is permissioned, not public — it is designed for known-participant consortiums, not open networks.
• The consensus layer (SBFT / Project Concord) is open source and deployable across multiple clouds and on-premise environments.
• Day-2 operations — upgrades, monitoring, and governance — are treated as first-class concerns, not afterthoughts.
• The developer experience layer targets DApp builders who should not need to understand BFT internals to build on the platform.
• The HotStuff consensus algorithm that influenced Facebook’s Libra originated partly from VMware research, indicating the depth of VMware’s academic and engineering investment in this space.

Berman Capital Advisors Increases ServiceNow Position

Berman Capital Advisors LLC increased its position in ServiceNow Inc (NYSE:NOW) by 6.9% during the second quarter of 2019, according to the firm’s most recent Form 13F filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). After purchasing an additional 219 shares during the quarter, the firm held a total of 3,384 shares in the information technology services provider, valued at approximately $928,000 at the end of the quarter.

Broader Institutional Investor Activity

Several other institutional investors also adjusted their ServiceNow holdings around the same period:

• Marshall Wace LLP opened a new position in ServiceNow during Q1 2019, valued at approximately $724,000.
• Arcadia Investment Management Corp MI increased its stake by 219.5% in Q2 2019, acquiring an additional 1,855 shares to reach a total of 2,700 shares valued at $741,000.
• Dock Street Asset Management Inc. initiated a new position in Q1 2019 valued at approximately $937,000.
• Roman Butler Fullerton & Co. grew its stake by 4.9% in Q1 2019, adding 133 shares for a total of 2,857 shares valued at $704,000.
• Glaxis Capital Management LLC opened a new position in Q1 2019 valued at approximately $2,075,000.

As of the time of this report, approximately 92.95% of ServiceNow’s outstanding stock was held by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

Stock Performance and Key Financial Ratios

Shares of NYSE:NOW opened at $263.82 on the Friday preceding publication. Key metrics at that time included:

• 50-day moving average: $285.13
• 52-week low: $147.63
• 52-week high: $303.17
• Market capitalisation: $48.55 billion
• P/E ratio: 1,319.10
• PEG ratio: 21.78
• Beta: 1.30
• Quick ratio: 1.13
• Current ratio: 1.13
• Debt-to-equity ratio: 0.88

Q2 2019 Earnings Results

ServiceNow reported its Q2 2019 earnings on Wednesday, 24 July 2019. Key highlights included:

• EPS: ($0.01), beating the Zacks consensus estimate of ($0.03) by $0.02.
• Revenue: $833.90 million, slightly ahead of the analyst consensus of $831.50 million.
• Year-over-year revenue growth: 32.1% compared to the same quarter in 2018.
• Return on equity: 4.44%
• Net margin: 0.09%

For context, ServiceNow reported EPS of $0.49 in the same quarter the prior year. Analysts at the time collectively expected full-year EPS of $0.43 for the current fiscal year.

Analyst Ratings and Price Targets

Multiple Wall Street research firms issued updated commentary on ServiceNow shares around the time of publication:

• Barclays raised its price target from $270.00 to $280.00 with an Overweight rating (April 25th research note).
• Jefferies Financial Group raised its price target from $285.00 to $330.00 with a Buy rating (July 25th research note).
• Deutsche Bank raised its price target from $285.00 to $305.00 with a Buy rating (May 7th research note).
• Cowen raised its price target from $260.00 to $280.00 with an Outperform rating (April 25th research note).
• Piper Jaffray Companies raised its price target from $260.00 to $270.00 with an Overweight rating (April 25th research note).

In aggregate, four analysts held a Hold rating, twenty-six issued a Buy rating, and two assigned a Strong Buy rating. The consensus price target stood at $287.86 with an overall consensus rating of Buy.

Insider Transactions

Two notable insider sales were reported around this period:

• Michael Scarpelli (insider) sold 25,899 shares on 16 May 2019 at an average price of $278.41, totalling $7,210,540.59. Following the sale, Scarpelli directly held 37,071 shares valued at approximately $10,320,937.11. The transaction was filed with the SEC.
• Chirantan Jitendra Desai (insider) sold 1,560 shares on 8 August 2019 at an average price of $263.05, totalling $410,358.00. Following the sale, Desai held 3,094 shares valued at approximately $813,876.70.

Over the preceding quarter, company insiders collectively sold 116,647 shares of stock valued at approximately $32,406,691. Insiders held approximately 1.00% of the company’s outstanding stock at the time of reporting.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow, Inc. provides enterprise cloud computing solutions that define, structure, manage, and automate services for enterprises worldwide. The company offers IT service management (ITSM) applications alongside digital workflow products covering customer service, human resources, security operations, integrated risk management, and other enterprise functions. ServiceNow trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol NOW.

Note: All financial data in this article reflects conditions as of August 2019 and should not be used as current investment guidance.

The Problem: Jira as a Graveyard

Atlassian’s Statuspage team had a bug-tracking workflow that looked reasonable on paper but broke down in practice as the team grew. Bug reports moved from customer support to an escalation engineer (EE), who would either fix a data issue directly or hand it to a developer. Simple problems got solved; complex ones got filed in Jira — and stayed there.

As Senior Development Team Lead Andrew Burleson described it:

“‘Put it in Jira’ became code for ‘forget about it’, and since putting things in Jira didn’t feel valuable, people often didn’t bother, so a lot of good ideas or observations weren’t getting captured.”

— Andrew Burleson, Atlassian

The knock-on effects were significant:

• Customer support had to chase developers to get responses back to customers.
• Response times were unpredictable and inconsistent.
• Ad-hoc, peer-to-peer bug assignments interrupted mainline feature work.
• A growing backlog of unresolved issues created ongoing customer experience debt.

Three Principles to Rethink Support

Rather than simply adding more process on top of a broken system, the team established three foundational principles to guide their redesign:

1. Communication beats speed. Not every bug can be fixed immediately, but timely, honest communication to customers throughout the resolution process is acceptable — and appreciated.
2. Throttle the interrupt work. The flow of unexpected bugs and high-priority requests is unpredictable, but manageable. By understanding the long-term rate of incoming tickets and resolving them at the same rate or slightly faster, the backlog stops growing.
3. Filter the noise ruthlessly. Much of the existing backlog was already resolved, no longer relevant, or out of scope for the product’s direction. Removing that noise made the real workload visible — and manageable.

The Gamification Fix: Poker Chips and Weekly Taxes

With sound principles in place, the team needed a mechanism that was simple, fair, and — crucially — engaging. Their solution was a gamified token economy built around physical poker chips.

How the System Works

• Each developer starts with two poker chips.
• Completing an “Overhead” ticket (a bug or support issue from the backlog) earns the developer additional chips.
• Every week, a tax is collected — typically one chip per developer.
• The tax rate is adjusted up or down to ensure the Overhead backlog drains at a controlled pace.
• Developers who have accumulated chips in reserve can pay the tax from their stockpile, buying themselves a week free from overhead work during crunch periods.
• Lighter weeks become an opportunity to tackle more overhead work and rebuild the stockpile.

Burleson explained the intent behind the design:

“By empowering developers to control their own schedules, we actually get more mainline and overhead work done, with less need for micro-management.”

— Andrew Burleson, Atlassian

Results: Fewer Forgotten Bugs, Happier Customers

After adopting the Overhead process, the Statuspage team reported several concrete improvements:

• The bug backlog was brought under control without derailing feature development.
• Issues are now triaged, assigned, and resolved at a regular, predictable cadence.
• More bugs — including higher-priority ones — are being fixed faster.
• Customer support no longer needs to babysit developers; every issue reaches a resolution and can be closed with the customer.
• Customers receive timely updates and realistic expectations, improving satisfaction even when a fix takes time.

“We’ve battle-tested it for several years, and now we’re happy to share it with other teams in hopes that others can benefit as much as we have.”

— Andrew Burleson, Atlassian

Key Takeaways for Engineering Teams

Atlassian’s approach offers practical lessons that apply beyond their specific toolset:

• Visibility matters more than volume. A backlog no one trusts is worse than no backlog at all. Auditing and pruning stale tickets is a legitimate, high-value engineering activity.
• Flow rate beats heroics. Sustainable bug resolution at a consistent pace outperforms occasional sprints of firefighting followed by long silences.
• Developer autonomy improves throughput. Giving engineers control over when they absorb interrupt work — rather than mandating it week-to-week — reduces resentment and increases actual output.
• Gamification works best when it is transparent and fair. The poker chip model is simple enough to understand immediately and gives every developer the same starting point and the same rules.
• Support and engineering alignment is a product quality issue. When customer support can reliably close the loop with customers, trust in the product improves independently of the bug fix rate.

Teams looking to replicate this approach do not need Statuspage or any specific Atlassian tool — the underlying principles of throttled intake, transparent prioritisation, and token-based developer autonomy can be adapted to any issue tracker or support workflow.

Global DevOps Market at a Glance

According to market research published in mid-2019, the global DevOps market was valued at approximately USD 3.62 billion in 2018 and was projected to reach USD 20.01 billion by 2026, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 24.7% over the 2019–2026 forecast period. These figures reflect accelerating enterprise investment in continuous delivery pipelines, cloud-native infrastructure, and automation toolchains.

Even setting aside specific projections, the underlying drivers are clear: organisations across verticals were—and continue to be—under pressure to ship software faster, improve reliability, and reduce the cost of change. DevOps practices directly address all three pressures, which explains the sustained market growth.

Key Market Drivers

• Cloud adoption: Migration to public, private, and hybrid cloud environments creates a natural forcing function for DevOps tooling, particularly around infrastructure-as-code and automated provisioning.
• Agile transformation: Enterprises scaling Agile practices beyond individual teams need DevOps pipelines to prevent delivery bottlenecks.
• Microservices and containers: Container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, ECS) require robust CI/CD pipelines and observability tooling to operate reliably at scale.
• Security and compliance pressure: The shift toward DevSecOps embeds security scanning, policy enforcement, and audit trails directly into delivery pipelines.
• Talent and toolchain consolidation: Platform engineering teams consolidating fragmented toolchains onto integrated DevOps platforms drive recurring software and SaaS spend.

Market Restraints

• Cultural resistance: Organisational silos between development, operations, and security teams remain the most cited barrier to DevOps adoption.
• Skill gaps: Demand for engineers fluent in both software development and infrastructure operations outpaces supply in most markets.
• Legacy infrastructure: Large enterprises with significant mainframe or on-premises estate face higher integration costs when adopting modern DevOps toolchains.
• Vendor lock-in concerns: Dependence on a single cloud provider’s DevOps services can constrain portability and negotiating leverage.

Leading Vendors in the DevOps Ecosystem

The 2019 research identified the following companies as leading players in the global DevOps market. The landscape has continued to evolve through acquisitions and product expansion since publication.

• Google – Cloud Build, Anthos, GKE; strong in Kubernetes-native DevOps
• Microsoft – Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS), GitHub Actions, extensive enterprise reach
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) – CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy; dominant cloud platform
• IBM – DevOps toolchains on IBM Cloud, integration with Red Hat OpenShift
• Red Hat – OpenShift, Ansible, acquired by IBM in 2019
• Atlassian – Jira, Bitbucket Pipelines, Confluence; strong in issue tracking and collaboration
• Oracle – Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DevOps service, Developer Cloud Service
• CA Technologies (now Broadcom) – Rally, Automic; enterprise Agile planning and release automation
• Micro Focus – ALM Octane, Fortify; testing and security integration
• Puppet – Infrastructure automation and configuration management

Regional Market Breakdown

The research segmented the market across five major regions. Understanding regional variation helps organisations and vendors prioritise investment and partnership strategies.

North America

North America represented the largest share of the DevOps market at the time of the report, driven by early enterprise cloud adoption, a mature Agile ecosystem, and concentration of major DevOps vendors (AWS, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian). The US, Canada, and Mexico were covered individually.

Europe

Europe showed strong growth, particularly in the UK, Germany, and France. GDPR compliance requirements created additional demand for DevSecOps tooling and auditable pipeline practices.

Asia-Pacific

Asia-Pacific was cited as the fastest-growing region, with China, Japan, and India as primary contributors. Rapid digital transformation initiatives and large developer communities in India and China drove adoption.

Middle East, Africa, and Latin America

These regions represented smaller but emerging opportunities, with growth tied to cloud infrastructure investment and government-backed digital transformation programmes.

Market Segmentation Dimensions

Analysts typically segment the DevOps market across three primary dimensions:

By Deployment Model

• Cloud (SaaS/PaaS): Hosted DevOps platforms managed by the vendor; lowest operational overhead
• On-premises: Self-hosted toolchains, preferred by regulated industries with strict data residency requirements
• Hybrid: Combination deployments bridging on-premises systems with cloud-native pipelines

By Solution Type

• Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
• Configuration management and infrastructure automation
• Monitoring and observability
• Collaboration and planning (Agile boards, wikis)
• Security testing integration (SAST, DAST, SCA)

By Industry Vertical

• Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI)
• IT and telecommunications
• Retail and e-commerce
• Healthcare and life sciences
• Government and public sector
• Manufacturing

Analytical Frameworks Used in DevOps Market Research

Comprehensive market reports in this space typically apply several standard analytical frameworks to assess the competitive environment and market attractiveness:

• Porter’s Five Forces: Evaluates competitive rivalry, threat of new entrants, supplier power, buyer power, and threat of substitutes within the DevOps tooling market.
• PEST Analysis: Assesses Political, Economic, Social, and Technological factors influencing DevOps adoption across regions.
• Value Chain Analysis: Maps how value is created and delivered across planning, development, testing, deployment, and monitoring stages.
• SWOT Analysis: Applied at the company level to profile strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for leading vendors.

Technology Trends Shaping the DevOps Market

Beyond the forecast period covered by the original report, several technology trends have reinforced or accelerated the growth trajectory identified in 2019:

• GitOps: Using Git repositories as the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure state, enabling declarative and auditable deployments.
• Platform engineering: Dedicated internal developer platforms (IDPs) abstracting infrastructure complexity, reducing cognitive load on application teams.
• AI-assisted development and operations: Code completion, anomaly detection, and incident correlation tools integrating into DevOps pipelines.
• FinOps integration: Cost visibility and optimisation built into deployment pipelines to govern cloud spend alongside velocity.
• Supply chain security: SBOM generation, provenance attestation, and signing workflows becoming standard pipeline components post-SolarWinds and Log4Shell incidents.

What This Means for DevOps Practitioners

Market growth figures confirm what practitioners already observe on the ground: DevOps investment is not a passing trend. Engineering leaders can use this context to:

• Build business cases for internal platform teams and toolchain consolidation
• Anticipate continued vendor competition and evaluate multi-vendor or open-source strategies to avoid lock-in
• Identify skill development priorities (Kubernetes, security automation, observability) that align with where the market is heading
• Benchmark their organisation’s maturity against regional and vertical peers when assessing gaps

Note: The market size figures and CAGR cited in this article originate from a third-party research report published in 2019 via financialplanning24.com. Readers seeking current market data should consult up-to-date research from recognised analysts such as Gartner, IDC, or Forrester.

Co-Investment Is Becoming a Strategic Imperative

VMware’s vice president for worldwide channels, Jenni Flinders, has made clear that co-investment with partners is an increasing priority for the data centre infrastructure software company. Speaking to CRN in Sydney, Flinders described partner relationships built around mutual investment in skills as “getting really strategic for us.”

While Flinders stopped short of revealing specifics — late August announcements about VMware’s then-forthcoming “Partner Connect” program were still under wraps — she outlined what VMware is looking for in its deepest partner engagements: shared commitment, demonstrated capability, and investment in formal competency attainment.

Master Services Competencies: The Core of Deep Partnerships

At the heart of VMware’s co-investment philosophy is the attainment of a Master Services Competency (MSC). At the time of the interview, VMware offered five competencies covering:

• VMware on AWS
• Desktop & Mobility
• Network Virtualisation
• Data Centre Virtualisation
• Cloud Management & Automation

Flinders noted that partners who invest in a master competency consistently demonstrate greater technical depth, enabling them to secure more complex client engagements. That capability, in turn, makes them stronger candidates for co-selling opportunities alongside VMware’s own sales teams.

Real-World Impact: An Australian Partner’s Experience

Australian partner Parallo offers a concrete example of the value a master competency can unlock. Co-founder and regional director Shaun Webber told CRN that after the company attained a Master Services Competency in Data Centre Virtualisation — becoming one of just three Australian firms to hold it at the time — both VMware’s internal teams and enterprise customers took notice.

“It gets us past the ‘who are these guys?’ conversation with executive sales people at VMware. It gets us into bigger customers.”

— Shaun Webber, Co-founder & Regional Director, Parallo

Webber’s point is instructive for any partner evaluating the return on investment in formal certification programs: the credential acts as a trust signal both internally within VMware’s channel organisation and externally with prospective enterprise clients.

Diversity as a Business and Talent Strategy

Flinders also addressed diversity during a channel conference in Australia — and her definition deliberately goes beyond conventional framing. As she explained to CRN:

“Not just talking about your gender, or race or whatever, but diversity and background, its diversity and your skill, its diversity across industry.”

— Jenni Flinders, VP Worldwide Channels, VMware

This broader view of diversity encompasses professional background, domain expertise, and industry experience — not only demographic characteristics. For channel partners, Flinders argued, this has a direct business implication: hiring too narrowly limits access to talent.

Practical Advice for Partners of All Sizes

Flinders acknowledged that smaller partners in particular tend to fall into the trap of hiring from familiar networks — the “usual suspects” — when a position opens up. Her recommendation was straightforward:

“How about smaller partners broaden their network a little bit. And maybe next time they need to fill a position, actually making sure that there’s diversity across their network to maybe pull in some talent that they normally might not have through their traditional network?”

— Jenni Flinders, VP Worldwide Channels, VMware

Her conclusion was that even the smallest channel partners should maintain a deliberate diversity plan — not as a compliance exercise, but as a talent acquisition strategy. Organisations that hire within a narrow circle risk missing out on skills, perspectives, and experience that exist just outside their immediate network.

Key Takeaways for VMware Channel Partners

• Invest in Master Services Competencies to differentiate from competitors and qualify for co-selling with VMware’s enterprise sales teams.
• Treat certification as a trust signal — both to VMware’s internal organisation and to prospective enterprise customers.
• Adopt a broad definition of diversity that includes professional background, skill sets, and industry experience, not only demographic factors.
• Build a diversity hiring plan regardless of company size to avoid talent blind spots created by over-reliance on existing networks.

This article covers VMware’s channel strategy as reported in mid-2019. VMware’s Partner Connect programme and master services competency structure may have evolved since then, particularly following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Readers should consult current VMware or Broadcom partner documentation for up-to-date programme details.

Elastic Brings Managed Elasticsearch to GCP Tokyo

Elastic N.V. (NYSE: ESTC), the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced in August 2019 that Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud became available in a fifth Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region: Asia Pacific (Tokyo). This made Tokyo the first GCP region for Elastic in Asia Pacific, complementing four other GCP regions the company already operated globally at the time of the announcement.

The expansion was driven by growing demand from Japanese enterprises and SMBs modernising their IT infrastructure — moving workloads off on-premises, traditional data centres and onto public cloud platforms.

“Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has a growing presence in Japan and we’re excited to partner with Google. This new GCP Tokyo region for Elasticsearch Service will give Japan customers a SaaS-first solution for their search, logging, APM, business analytics, infrastructure monitoring, security use cases and more.”

— Tom Kawasaki, Elastic Japan Country Manager

What Is Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud?

Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud is the official hosted Elasticsearch and Kibana offering, built and supported by Elastic themselves. As a fully managed service, it abstracts away cluster administration so teams can focus on their data and applications rather than operational overhead.

Key capabilities included at the time of this announcement:

• Elastic APM — Application performance monitoring integrated directly into the stack
• Elastic SIEM — Security information and event management for threat detection and response
• Elastic Maps — Geospatial visualisation within Kibana
• Canvas — Custom, live infographic-style presentations of data
• Machine learning — Anomaly detection and forecasting built into the platform
• Same-day version and security patch availability
• Zero-downtime upgrades
• Pre-configured hardware templates optimised for common use cases
• Direct support from Elastic

All of these features were made available immediately in the new Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region, consistent with Elastic’s other regional deployments.

Why the Tokyo Region Matters for Asia Pacific Customers

Running Elasticsearch clusters in-region reduces network latency for end users and applications hosted in Japan and nearby Asia Pacific markets. It also helps organisations meet data residency and compliance requirements that may mandate data remain within specific geographic boundaries.

Industries with particularly strong demand for low-latency search, real-time analytics, and log management — such as gaming, e-commerce, and financial services — stand to benefit directly from regional availability.

“As a GCP partner as well as an Elastic partner, we’re extremely excited to start using the Elasticsearch Service on the GCP Tokyo region. The gaming industry and other industries in Japan will greatly appreciate this announcement.”

— Yusuke Hasegawa, President and CEO, grasys Inc.

Deepening the Elastic–Google Cloud Partnership

The Tokyo launch was part of a broader, multi-year strategic partnership between Elastic and Google Cloud. At the time of the announcement, several additional integration milestones were either completed or in progress:

Next GCP Region: Sydney, Australia

Elastic announced that the next planned GCP region would be in Sydney, Australia, further expanding Asia Pacific coverage.

Native GCP Console Integration

Elasticsearch Service was being positioned as a Managed Partner Service (MPS) within the main GCP Console — the same interface where native Google services are provisioned. The planned integration would allow lifecycle operations such as creating, scaling, configuring, and reconfiguring Elasticsearch clusters using familiar GCP-style workflows, without leaving the GCP Console.

Integrated Billing Through GCP Marketplace

GCP customers were set to be able to provision Elasticsearch Service through the GCP Marketplace and have that spend count fully towards their existing Google Cloud committed spend. This simplifies procurement significantly for enterprises with pre-negotiated GCP contracts.

“Google Cloud and Elastic are both committed to the open source community and are excited to announce the expanded availability of Elastic Cloud in GCP’s Tokyo region, and unified billing, coming soon. This brings simplicity and speeds up the time to value realization for joint customers.”

— Masato Takahashi, Director, Partnerships, Google Cloud Japan

“New regions like Tokyo and Sydney, seamless access to the Elasticsearch Service through the Google Cloud Platform Console, and billing through Google Cloud, which is targeted for release this August, are all examples of our mutual investments to create a great user experience in the cloud.”

— Craig Griffin, Vice President of Business Development, Elastic

Getting Started with Elasticsearch Service on GCP Tokyo

The following guidance was provided at the time of the announcement:

• Existing Elasticsearch Service users: Log in to Elastic Cloud and select the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) GCP region when creating a new deployment.
• Migrating self-managed workloads: Elastic’s documentation and migration webinars provide guidance on moving from self-hosted Elasticsearch to the managed service.
• New users: A 14-day free trial was available, requiring only an email address to get started.

About Elastic

Elastic is a search company and the creator of the Elastic Stack — comprising Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. Elastic builds both self-managed and SaaS offerings designed to make data usable in real time and at scale across search, logging, security, and analytics use cases.

Elastic and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Elastic N.V. and its subsidiaries. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.