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 Chief Technology Officer, and will continue to serve on the Board of Directors. 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.