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.

Subscription includes on-premise installations; it’s just another licensing model. It is common to move away from perpetual license up-front followed by maintenance models to a more spread-out revenue model and better predictability for Wall Street (plus potentially better quarterly deal volitility insulation because of more deferred revenue, especially if they’re doing up-front multi-year subscriptions).

They also say that the majority of their revenue is from enterprises running their own instances.

Anyway, the point is mostly moot for an investor, but it is interesting as a technical person to observe that many SaaS plays aren’t entirely or even mostly *aaS, they’re open source software sold as enteprise software subscriptions (priced at enterprise or SaaS levels too, not a bargain basement OSS support contract)