Case Study: ELKJØP achieves record Black Friday sales and real-time insights with Microsoft Power BI

Norwegian electronics giant scales for sales, sets record with cloud-based transaction processing

ELKJØP, the Norwegian electronics retailer, needed to reliably scale its online systems to meet extreme, predictable peaks in demand—most notably Black Friday—without the cost and lead times of major on‑premises hardware upgrades. To do this it adopted Microsoft cloud technologies, including Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions, and used Microsoft Power BI for performance analytics and monitoring.

The vendor solution moved ELKJØP’s transaction processing to a globally distributed, low‑latency cloud architecture that automatically scales, with Azure Cosmos DB handling fast, highly available data storage, Azure Functions on a consumption plan reducing dev costs, and Microsoft Power BI supplying real‑time insights. The results: a record Nordic Black Friday—NOK 1.32 billion (USD 165M) in sales, 200 credit‑card purchases per second and 3.9 million payments by 2:00 PM—while preserving lightning‑fast response, ~99.99% uptime, and cutting development environment costs roughly in half.

ELKJØP

Jonas Granlund

Cloud Architect Consultant from Communicate Norge AS