Improved Growth Profile Taking Longer to Emerge, Downgrade to Equal-weight

Research evidence excerpt

Improved Growth Profile Taking Longer to Emerge, Downgrade to Equal-weight

IdeaMresilient customer interest and improving cross-sell/upsell – so the crowding

concern is something we view as a medium-term risk.

How Do We View the Moat / Journey?

In our Sector Insight today, we evaluated our software coverage universe through

the lens of the opportunity and threat from AI. We looked at companies across two

dimensions: the Moat a company has against AI-related risks and the Journey a

company must take as it adapts to the pricing model, development cycle, and

interaction method that will define the next phase of software. ESTC screens mid-

pack overall (3rd quintile) – a 4th-quintile moat score (29/50) set against a 2nd-

quintile journey score (35/50). On moat, Elastic is positioned less as a system of

record customers standardize on. This is compounded by thin network effects, a

diminished open-source observability standing and an increasingly crowded SIEM

field. On journey, we see the right ingredients – consumption pricing, platform

breadth, and strong proprietary data – but softer agent-orchestration and agentic-

roadmap scores mean the AI upside has yet to show up in the reported growth rate.

We could get more constructive on shares as evidence that the ~5% AI growth

tailwind is materializing – rising AI-cohort penetration translating into accelerating

sales-led subscription growth – alongside either traction in observability

consolidation or SIEM share gains large enough to drive a durable inflection in

topline.

Exhibit 2: Moat vs. Journey Quadrant

Source: Morgan Stanley Research

Risk/Reward Screens Balanced Given Current Growth Prospects

While ESTC continues to screen cheap on our revised estimates, trading at 2.9x EV/