Elastic NV said it settled a two-year-old trademark lawsuit filed against Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit, ending a dispute that began when Amazon Web Services released a version of the smaller company’s Elasticsearch data-search product.
AWS agreed to stop using the name Elasticsearch in its project or service names, according to Elastic Chief Executive Officer Ashutosh Kulkarni. Other terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed. The software is used to search and analyze website, application and security data.
“We view this as a significant step in removing the confusion in the marketplace because there is only one Elasticsearch, and it’s only from Elastic,” said Shay Banon, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
AWS earlier this year had rebranded the product, which was based on Elastic’s open source software, as OpenSearch, but the company was still using the term Elasticsearch to refer to products from AWS, Kulkarni said.
In the lawsuit, Elastic alleged that Amazon was misleading customers with its own versions of Elastic’s software, while Amazon complained that Elastic was pulling back from the free-distribution, open-source ideals it originally espoused for its programs.
The suit was an attempt by Elastic to curb what Amazon critics, including rivals and elected officials, say are efforts by the Seattle-based company to unfairly use software provided for free under the open-source model. Elastic also drew criticism from other open-source technology vendors over the company’s decision amid the legal dispute to change its licensing system, effectively restricting major cloud providers from offering the software without a subscription.
Within the Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000, three merchants name Elastic as their site search vendor and two use Elastic for web performance.
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