Unlocking Real-Time Big Data Insights: Suning’s Elastic-Powered Smart Retail Journey

Elastic Nanjing Technical Exchange Overview

To promote Elastic technology development and academic exchange, on April 27 Suning Technology jointly with the Elastic Chinese community held the Elastic Nanjing Technical Exchange at Suning headquarters. Leading tech experts from major internet companies gathered to learn and share. The conference focused on Elastic open‑source products such as Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats, discussing practices and applications in search, real‑time data analysis, log analysis, and security, with several Elastic experts sharing related technologies and experiences.

Suning’s Smart Retail Brain Powered by Big Data

Suning Technology Data Center General Manager Sun Qian noted that after nearly 30 years of development Suning has become a leading smart‑retail enterprise in China, with exponential business growth and massive data volumes that make search and analysis increasingly challenging. Consequently, Suning Technology Group, based on cloud services and the RaaS concept, built a smart‑retail brain grounded in big data. This brain is now open to empower more enterprises, offering an integrated platform of data, scenarios, and link services.

Suning’s Big Data Platform Capabilities

Han Baojun from Suning Technology Data Center explained that efficient retrieval and analysis of massive business data is a key research focus. Suning’s big‑data platform now hosts over 4,000 profile tags and 9,000 intelligent data models, providing a one‑stop development, analysis, and application platform. It offers tools for data collection, storage, computing, security, analysis, development, and services, as well as an enterprise‑level intelligent platform that combines AI and data‑management capabilities. The collection management platform uses Elasticsearch to query massive log data, handling over a trillion data points per day during major promotions. The tag platform leverages Elasticsearch to select more than 4,000 audience groups daily for precise marketing. This capability underpins Suning’s rapid growth and has been packaged into data‑service products such as Xinghe, Liuxingyu, and Shuzhi, which are now offered to other enterprises.

Insights from Elastic Experts

Elastic Chinese community architect Zhu Jie analyzed the typical journey of an Elasticsearch user from beginner to advanced, outlining common challenges at each stage and offering practical solutions.

Case Studies: Huatai Securities and Beijing Youtejie

Ge Baolei, head of the log‑system platform at Huatai Securities, shared his experience of seamlessly upgrading Elasticsearch to version 6.0 without impacting business operations. Chen Qiuhua, Elastic technology lead at Beijing Youtejie, demonstrated how to use Elasticsearch for more precise and human‑centric business correlation analysis.

Future Outlook

The conference delivered abundant practical knowledge, and participants gained valuable insights. Suning will continue to increase investment in big data, introduce cutting‑edge technologies, expand R&D and talent acquisition, and advance the smart‑retail brain toward greater intelligence and scenario‑based services, driving the broader big‑data industry forward. Suning Technology will also keep opening the smart‑retail brain capabilities to ecosystem partners, sharing development outcomes.