Transforming digital experiences: How Liferay's partnership with Elastic drives revenue and efficiency

As a commercial open source vendor, Liferay is accustomed to using popular open source technologies, including Tomcat, JBoss, and MySQL. For search functionality, it first incorporated Lucene, an Apache project, and later added Apache Solr as an option.

But as Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP)  began powering business-critical solutions for enterprise clients, such as Cisco and Volkswagen, Liferay needed to offer its customers vendor-backed support for important parts of the platform like search. At the same time, enterprise customers also started to encounter the limitations of Lucene and Solr. “We needed a search platform with better scalability, cluster replication, and failover capabilities,” says Brian Chan, Liferay’s CEO.  

A growing number of enterprise customers were asking Liferay to integrate Elasticsearch into Liferay DXP. Its popularity in the open source community and advanced features aligned with the technical needs of Liferay’s customers. Most importantly, Elastic’s commercial subscription provided the vendor-backed support required by enterprises.

Leading up to 2015, Liferay formalized a commercial relationship that allowed it to offer the open source version of Elastic as a preferred option. But to provide vendor support for search and to streamline procurement for customers, Liferay decided to enter an OEM agreement with Elastic in 2015. “Vendor support and subscription-only features, such as Elastic’s cross-cluster replication, are crucial for our enterprise customers,” says Chan.

Today, Liferay has selected Elasticsearch to be its default bundled search server, supporting Liferay's key attributes of flexibility, low-code configuration, content management, personalization, and commerce. Using Elasticsearch server runtime in Liferay DXP Docker container images improves customer experience by delivering relevant results in real time.

The organization has taken advantage of customization features, including Liferay’s Elasticsearch monitoring widget, which acts as a proxy for Kibana’s UI, allowing administrators to add it to pages and interact with Kibana directly from Liferay’s platform. The sidecar Elasticsearch runtime includes custom logic to manage the starting and stopping of the Elasticsearch node’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM) from the Liferay application.

As an OEM partner, Liferay benefits from Elastic's OEM agreement. It features flexible commercial terms depending on the PaaS or self-hosted hosting models, which are designed to cater to distinct customer needs and preferences.

For example, SaaS is favored for its convenience while PaaS offers more control and flexibility over upgrades and deployments, and the self-hosted option works best for customers with existing cloud infrastructure or for those in regulated sectors with strong data residency requirements.

By integrating Elasticsearch with its platform, Liferay effectively meets market demands for performance and accuracy without extensive internal development. As an OEM partner, it can escalate support tickets and benefit from timely releases for bug fixes and enhanced capabilities. And while Liferay maintains its own support team, including search specialists, Elastic’s second- and third-line support gives the organization freedom to focus development resources on building features more closely aligned with its core competencies.

“Elastic isn’t just an OEM partner — they are a valuable business ally with huge potential for further collaboration,” says Chan. Liferay is already exploring the potential of Elastic AI features that enable generative AI, including Elastic’s vector database, which supports semantic search. “With Elastic, we are well positioned for the future of AI search experiences.”