How Beijing Mobile’s CRM Order Center Achieved Level‑2 DevOps Technical Operations Excellence

Editor’s note: According to a McKinsey study, success for technology companies hinges on two factors: standardization and tool empowerment. Standards gather best practices; embedding them in tools guides teams toward value‑adding work, aligning with the core idea of systematic technical‑operation capability building.

On November 1, 2019, the GOPS Global Operations Conference was held in Shanghai. It is the first and largest domestic operations summit, attracting experts from internet, finance, telecom and other traditional industries to share advanced technical ideas and best practices.

The conference featured sessions on technical‑operation standards, AIOps scenarios, DevOps case studies, and special tracks from Alibaba and Tencent, covering nearly 70 topics across the entire operations technology field.

Beijing Mobile’s CRM Order Center project successfully passed the DevOps standard technical‑operation assessment, receiving a certificate from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) for the "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model". This demonstrates that Beijing Mobile’s technical‑operation capability for this business system has reached an advanced domestic level.

Q&A Highlights with Ding Jian, General Manager of Beijing Mobile Information Systems

Q: Please introduce yourself, your company, and the project you evaluated.

Ding Jian: Beijing Mobile, a subsidiary of China Mobile, serves millions of citizens and enterprises, and supports major international events. The CRM Order Center was selected as a pilot project to benchmark, evaluate, and continuously improve technical‑operation capabilities. It provides standardized order services for enterprise customers, handling product transactions, sales, and cancellations across multiple channels.

Q: Your project achieved Level‑2 technical‑operation assessment. How does this rank domestically?

Ding Jian: Level‑2 technical‑operation is considered an advanced level in China; only Beijing Mobile and Huatai Securities have achieved it. Beijing Mobile is also the first telecom company to pass both continuous delivery and technical‑operation standards, reflecting a high maturity in DevOps practice.

Q: How was the project evaluated?

The Order Center sits at the core of the CRM system. During cloud‑native and centralization efforts, the CRM system became the primary customer‑touch platform, and the Order Center became the most critical component, managing product transaction information and supporting multiple business systems and customer service channels.

In the centralization process, the system was decoupled and redesigned as micro‑services, achieving high cohesion and low coupling. Key business services were containerized for elastic scaling.

Technical Architecture

The Order Center is built on a full‑cloud architecture using Kubernetes and Mesos+Marathon, with OpenStack providing hardware virtualization. It supports elastic scaling, dynamic scheduling, and service governance via the AIF (Telecom‑customized micro‑service framework), offering service discovery, governance, open APIs, load‑balancing, rate‑limiting, circuit‑breaking, and multi‑domain capabilities.

High‑availability is ensured through Oracle RAC database clusters, Redis Cluster (3 master + 6 replica), ActiveMQ three‑node clusters, and Zookeeper five‑node ensembles.

Typical deployment frequency exceeds 20 releases per month, with around 300 development and configuration requests monthly.

Intelligent Operations Platform

The platform comprises several integrated modules:

Configuration Management (CMDB): Manages full‑lifecycle information of configuration items and their relationships.

Monitoring Platform: Provides end‑to‑end business call‑chain monitoring, analysis, and topology visualization.

Log Center: Centralized storage, querying, and analysis of application and system logs.

Intelligent Operations Analysis: Uses AI algorithms for anomaly detection and root‑cause analysis.

Unified Operations Platform: Orchestrates, schedules, audits, and executes operational tasks.

Pre‑plan Platform: Automates pre‑plan orchestration and execution after alerts.

Event Management: Supports closed‑loop handling of incidents, problems, and changes.

Continuous Integration: Enables automated build and integration, already evaluated at CI Level‑3 maturity.

Operations Capability Open API: Exposes operational capabilities to third‑party systems for reuse.

Knowledge Base: Centralized repository for operational knowledge, experiences, and pre‑plans.

Unified Portal: Provides a single entry point for all operation‑related tools, workspaces, and permission management.

Future Plans

Beijing Mobile aims to elevate its technical‑operation capability from Level‑2 to Level‑3, expanding the mature practices across B, M, and O domains. The roadmap includes deeper AI‑ops integration for anomaly prediction, automated fault remediation, and continuous efficiency improvements, ultimately moving toward fully automated, AI‑driven operations.

Automation and AI are seen as the next trends: replacing manual operational tasks with automated processes and leveraging machine learning throughout the DevOps lifecycle to identify bottlenecks, predict issues, and support data‑driven decision‑making.

The "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" was jointly developed by CAICT, cloud‑computing open‑source alliances, leading enterprises, and top universities, and has been officially adopted by ITU‑T and the China Communications Standardization Association.

Technical‑operation focuses on delivering stable, secure, reliable, and efficient services while enhancing user experience, efficiency, and business value.