In this interview, Alf Franklin, Area Vice President, Public Sector International at Elastic, discusses the firm’s core mission to help everyone transform data into actionable answers and outcomes using Search AI
Here, Alf Franklin, Area Vice President, Public Sector International at Elastic, discusses the company’s core mission: to empower everyone to transform data into actionable insights and outcomes through Search AI. He shares details about his professional journey and what led him to his current role at Elastic, as well as his initial attraction to the fields of search, observability, and cybersecurity.
Franklin also highlights how Elastic assists governments and public sector organisations in managing and making sense of their data. Additionally, he discusses the evolving relationship between open source communities and government in the years to come. Looking forward, we discover the role he hopes Elastic will play in shaping digital government transformation over the next decade.
Could you tell us a bit about your professional journey and what led you to your current role at Elastic?
Throughout my career, I’ve worked with systems that analyse government and citizen data to produce actionable intelligence. These systems are typically key elements of critical national and multinational infrastructure, so it’s imperative that public sector bodies can keep them secure and realise full value from the data they hold, in ways that are effective and responsible.
On top of that, I see open source technologies playing a vital role in the way public services are delivered. Public trust depends on open and transparent systems, and open source offers a way for government agencies to achieve their goals securely, cost-effectively, and efficiently.
Importantly, open source is also an enabler of skills development, providing a platform for engineers and data professionals to learn, experiment, and contribute, thereby building the capabilities needed to operationalise data, make faster decisions, strengthen resilience, and deliver better outcomes for citizens. This is an area I’m incredibly passionate about.
What first drew you to the world of search, observability and cybersecurity?
For me, it’s what these technologies enable government departments and agencies to achieve with the data they hold.
Many working in today’s public sector will readily admit that, for various reasons, they and their colleagues are only able to draw insights from a fraction of the information collected.
Elastic’s platform approach is all about helping them to unlock the value of that information and generate more value from technology, while – at the same time – protecting the data and systems from outside threats.
How would you describe Elastic’s core mission in a few sentences?
Elastic helps everyone transform data into answers, actions, and outcomes with Search AI.
It’s about using the power of platform thinking inherent in open source software development to enable our customers to build and develop capabilities for searching and managing access to intelligence across the widest range of data sources, both internal and external, to inform decisions in citizen services and safety.
What role does Elastic play in helping governments and public sector organisations manage and make sense of their data?
What we find in the public sector, in particular, is an urgent need to search for information across data sources that may reside in a wide range of systems. These systems are often scattered across different departments and agencies, making the challenge even tougher.
Elastic’s Search AI platform helps government teams access all their data, no matter where it resides, and use a common platform to make it accessible and usable, almost immediately. It does this by integrating search technology and AI to break down data silos and deliver real-time insights. Our technology is open, flexible, and secure and is built to help public institutions scale and adapt to any data-driven mission, from stronger operations, to better protection against cyber threats, and improved services for citizens.
Are there particular use cases – in national security, healthcare or local government – that illustrate Elastic’s value for the public sector?
Plenty – and they cover a vast range of use cases. Take, for example, the investigation of organised crime, where information spans multiple different government departments but can’t be copied and loaded into a large data lake, because of confidentiality and security concerns. In these kinds of situations, Elastic provides the search technology which enables that information to be explored and analysed in situ, accompanied by
a full audit trail.
Another example might be defence scenarios, where the data sets involved may span not just different source systems, but also those belonging to multiple national governments, their industrial suppliers, and open source intelligence. Making responsible, informed decisions in response to very difficult foreign policy situations demands not only access to all that data, but also careful attention to access controls and an audited record of the intelligence that informs those decisions.
What trends in data, search, and security excite you most right now?
Trusted AI, as I’ve already described, provides solid foundations for producing the ethical, auditable insights needed for effective decision-making.
Open source technology excites me because it builds on transparency and trust to accelerate innovation, foster a vibrant ecosystem, and create a shared foundation that scales from individual developers to the world’s largest enterprises. This openness lowers barriers to entry, drives mass adoption, and ensures technology can evolve quickly to meet real-world needs.
Another area that interests me is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which translates into the need to ground large language models (LLMs) to ensure they don’t “hallucinate” and provide relevant and trustworthy responses. This is particularly relevant as more and more public sector organisations adopt GenAI applications to streamline workflows and query their data.
Decisions require context from private data, particularly the ones that affect people’s lives, which is why RAG is so critical to the development and adoption of GenAI. Public bodies need solutions that can help them retrieve, rank, and prepare the right data from across their ecosystem so AI systems can act with accuracy and trust.
As more governments place their trust in us to support their mission-driven projects, we are witnessing Elastic emerge as the runtime platform for responsible GenAI applications, which is truly inspiring.
How do you see the relationship between open source communities and government evolving in the years ahead?
Over the past two decades, government recognition of the value of open source software has grown inexorably.
However, a proper understanding of how to harness its value has lagged behind somewhat, as a result of confusion in how to define community open source, enterprise open source, versus simply bespoking systems.
Procurement is catching up, but not without making some mistakes along the way, often because outsourcers have taken advantage of less experienced customers.
The true value of open source software is what it delivers to the customer: enablement and strategic sovereignty, which helps them drive their technology agenda and extract more value from their suppliers. It empowers organisations with flexible and adaptable technology, for any use case, as they build for the future.
Looking forward, what role do you hope Elastic will play in shaping digital government transformation over the next decade?
I joined Elastic as I feel confident the company is well-positioned to support the needed growth in skills and capabilities within government departments and agencies, both in platform development using our open source methods, and in unlocking and supercharging the value of information they hold.
The future of the public sector, and of critical verticals like defence, is digital, and that means we need more software engineers, data specialists, and AI-literate professionals. Elastic helps by not only providing the technology platform to make data actionable, but also the tools, training, and community-driven resources that empower teams to build those digital skills from the ground up.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
