Principal Product Manager - Identity Threat Detection & Response

QBS Software Africa expands security portfolio with Elastic partnership. New partnership brings Elastic's security, search and observability capabilities to partners and organisations across Africa. Johannesburg, 12 Oct 2026 QBS Software Africa today announced the addition of Elastic to its growing portfolio of cyber security and enterprise technology solutions, strengthening its offering to partners across South Africa and the wider African market. As organisations face increasingly complex IT environments, growing volumes of data and a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape, security and technology teams need greater visibility across their environments and the ability to turn vast amounts of data into actionable insight. Through the new partnership, QBS Software Africa will enable its channel partners to access Elastic's platform, helping organisations detect, investigate and respond to threats while gaining deeper visibility across their security, cloud and IT environments. Elastic brings together powerful search, security and observability capabilities on a unified platform. Elastic Security combines SIEM, XDR, endpoint security and cloud security to help security teams identify threats, investigate incidents and respond more efficiently. Its AI-powered capabilities are designed to accelerate security operations by assisting with alert triage, threat investigation, threat hunting and incident response. The partnership comes at a time when security teams are under increasing pressure to manage growing data volumes while responding to increasingly sophisticated threats. Traditional security environments can leave organisations working across multiple disconnected tools, making it difficult to correlate information and establish a complete picture of an attack. Elastic takes a data-centric approach, enabling organisations to bring security data together and apply analytics, automation and AI across the security operations life cycle. For QBS Software Africa, the addition of Elastic further strengthens its commitment to providing partners with technologies that address the evolving needs of modern security and IT environments. "Elastic is a strong addition to our portfolio because it brings together visibility, analytics, security and AI in a way that can help organisations tackle some of the most pressing challenges facing security and technology teams today," said Sanjay Mithal, Head of Strategic Alliance at QBS Software Africa. "Our partnership with Elastic will give our channel partners access to a powerful platform while providing the local expertise, enablement and go-to-market support needed to identify opportunities and deliver value to customers across the region." Elastic's security platform provides capabilities across the full security operations life cycle, from prevention and detection through investigation and response. Organisations can use Elastic to ingest and analyse data from across endpoints, cloud environments, networks and other sources, while AI-powered capabilities can help security teams prioritise attacks, accelerate investigations and automate response workflows. Beyond security, Elastic's broader platform supports observability and search use cases, giving organisations the ability to work with large volumes of data across applications, infrastructure and business environments. This provides partners with opportunities to address multiple technology requirements through a platform rather than approaching security, observability and data analytics as completely separate disciplines. The partnership will initially focus on building awareness, partner enablement and market development across South Africa, with opportunities to expand into additional African markets through QBS Software Africa's regional channel network. As organisations continue to navigate the convergence of cyber security, cloud, data and AI, QBS Software Africa and Elastic aim to help partners deliver technology solutions that provide greater visibility, stronger security and more actionable intelligence. QBS Software Africa, formerly Maxtec, combines the strength of a trusted value-added distributor with the scale of a global software delivery platform. As part of the QBS Technology Group, QBS Software Africa connects vendors, partners and end users across Africa, helping technology providers expand into new markets and enabling partners to source, deliver and scale the solutions their customers need.

Elastic has launched a private preview of Elastic nightshift AI SRE, an AI agent built into Elastic Observability that investigates system issues and provides evidence-backed answers. The tool continuously detects and investigates problems across entire technology stacks, surfacing issues that rule-based alerts miss. According to a NeuBird AI study from April 2026, 78% of organisations experienced at least one incident in the past year where no alert fired and customers discovered the problem first. Elastic nightshift AI SRE addresses this by evaluating all telemetry and correlating alerts, SLOs, and anomalies. The system connects telemetry data to source code from GitHub repositories and learns from resolved incidents to improve future investigations. Engineers can inspect investigation steps, including queries and underlying data. The service is available free to existing Elastic customers during early access on Elastic Observability Serverless, with broader technical preview planned later this year.

Elastic has launched AlertZero, an AI-powered system built into Elastic Security that uses specialised agents to handle security operations tasks. The system manages alert triage, investigation, threat hunting, detection tuning, and forensic analysis, aiming to reduce thousands of raw alerts to a short queue of recommended actions. AlertZero operates through "Watches" — named groups of agents with specific responsibilities that run on triggers and schedules. These include Triage Watch for alert management, Hunt Watch for continuous threat hunting, Detection Watch for rule tuning, and Forensics Watch for specialist analysis. The system works with any AI model across Elastic Cloud, self-managed, or air-gapped deployments. Security teams retain control over which actions are automated and which require human judgment. AlertZero is available as a technical preview to Elastic Security customers. Mike Nichols, general manager of Security at Elastic, said the platform provides teams with visibility and control to deploy agentic automation at scale.