For example: Why would a company pay Elastic when you could get ElasticSearch alongside other AWS services? Are these companies/teams not on AWS? Is Elastic support cheaper? Same with Twilio (vs AWS messaging), Databricks (why not AWS Spark EMR?), and so many others? Why Cloudera for Hadoop? What am I missing here? Are all these companies going to get crushed by AWS, Azure some day? Am I being super naive?
A lot of times smaller companies can fill in niche segments or needs that may not make sense for a really large company. Not just in the cloud business but true about most industries and services. If smaller companies can keep growing there, eventually they have the threshold to directly compete with the likes Amazon. If there is big and powerful incumbent, usually the strategy should be to not compete directly but complement or fill voids. I don't know about elastic but that's probably what they are trying.
Yes. They are at risk since if the cloud provider themselves can provide it with seamlessly integration with other components (ec2, s3) they'll get crushed easily if they don't offer something unique. WSJ did an article on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-amazon-wins-1527845402
Thanks. But wouldn't someone like neo4j and elastic lose existing business over time? (And not just the fact that new growth will slow down?) Are any of these people offering anything unique at all?
True. But customers using everything from a provider is locking themselves up with the provider. Maybe elastic or others are vendor neutral and that is their selling point.