I think they are transitioning from license/support to SaaS. Also looking at their statement SaaS is taking over in revenue. License 25 Million, subscriptions 123 Million in FY 18.
Subscriptions do not imply SaaS, though Wall Street often equates the two. It’s just a different licensing model that’s replacig the up-front perpetual license + 25% annual maintenance that is the old school enterprise software model.
The majority of that subscription revenue (they make this clear in other statements in the S-1) is enterprise deals running Elasticsearch & Friends on enterprise datacentres or clouds where Elastic isn’t providing a managed service - they’re providing traditional enterprise software support.
This isn’t unique to Elastic. Splunk, Pivotal, Mongo, MuleSoft, all are similar. Wall Street mostly cares about the revenue model, but there’s a nuance to it.
