How China’s Telecom Giants Accelerate Efficiency with the DevOps Maturity Model

In the context of digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to improve efficiency. The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series of standards, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), provides strong guidance for evaluating and enhancing IT capabilities across industries.

Telecom companies participating in DevOps maturity model assessments (total 17 projects):

China Unicom, China Mobile, China Telecom, Huawei, China Tower, ZTE and other leading telecom operators.

Zhejiang Mobile – OSS 4.0 Capability Center Performance Center

The OSS 4.0 performance center focuses on enterprise‑level services and platform capabilities, following the principles of unified data, capability sinking, open integration, and application linkage. It supports unified data ingestion, modeling, and computation, enabling rapid, decoupled application development. The DevOps transformation introduced a "four‑layer three‑team two‑line one‑body" (4321) model and a five‑step migration process covering organization, technology, process, and culture.

Beijing Mobile – Two Projects

E‑commerce System : Built on the self‑developed DevOps platform AiDo, it provides visual metric control, pipeline orchestration, and layered automated testing, improving development efficiency and delivery quality for all channels.

Centralized Performance Management System : Implements micro‑service decoupling and containerized deployment. Based on a "thick middle‑platform, thin application" architecture, it unifies data through a data middle‑platform and offers common technical components (GIS, UIUE, AI) via a technology middle‑platform, delivering capabilities such as alarm derivation and dispatch to upper‑level applications.

The DevOps platform integrates toolchains, container cloud management, micro‑service governance, software asset management, and capability open platforms, with customizations like visual Jenkins pipeline editing and full‑process monitoring.

Jiangsu Mobile – Alading Marketing Empowerment Project

Through the DevOps continuous delivery level‑3 assessment, the team achieved significant improvements across seven capability sub‑domains, shortening delivery cycles by 45%, reducing change lead time by 50%, lowering failure rate below 5%, cutting average build time to about 5 minutes, reaching 100% automated test coverage, and enabling on‑demand release frequency.

China Unicom – Resource Center One‑Card‑Recharge Project

The project standardizes interfaces for "one‑card‑recharge" management across 31 provinces, consolidating functionality, eliminating duplicate development, reducing software heterogeneity, and, combined with DevOps efficiency management, significantly lowering software management costs and boosting development efficiency.

Inner Mongolia Mobile – Government & Enterprise Business Support System (Esop)

The ESOP project provides a unified portal for regional customer managers, integrating multiple business platforms (BBOSS, provincial CRM, etc.) under a one‑stop service model. After the level‑3 continuous delivery assessment, delivery cycles shortened by 25%, version cycles by 50%, integration efficiency increased threefold, integration time reduced from 2 hours to under 30 minutes, and automated test coverage rose to 95%.

China Tower – Master Data Management Module

The project establishes a standardized master‑data governance system for the headquarters, covering organization, personnel, administrative regions, suppliers, customers, and assets. It currently offers 115 interfaces, serves 46 internal systems, and stores about 30 GB of data, enhancing data standardization and management capabilities.

Technical Operations (Standard 4) – Beijing Mobile CRM Order Center

The CRM Order Center, a core business system, provides standardized order services for enterprises. It runs on a fully cloud‑native architecture (K8s, Mesos+Marathon) with OpenStack virtualization, supporting elastic scaling, service governance, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and domain isolation via the AIF framework.

System & Tools (Standard 8) – Zhejiang Mobile Fengyun Energy Efficiency Platform

The project designs a tool platform that aligns with Zhejiang Mobile’s internal release control requirements and system architecture, supporting configuration injection, automated service registration, and cache refresh, enabling one‑stop rapid deployment of internal applications.

System & Tools (Standard 8) – China Telecom Integrated Biyi Collaborative R&D Platform

The platform, based on micro‑service architecture, integrates Jenkins, Nexus, Harbor, SonarQube and other DevOps tools with deep customizations, providing a visualized pipeline, full‑process monitoring, and a cloud‑native, end‑to‑end software lifecycle management solution.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model Overview

The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series of standards, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, major internet companies (BATJ), and leading financial and telecom enterprises, is the first domestic and international DevOps standard. It was officially concluded by the ITU‑T in July 2020, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard. The assessment framework covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security & risk management, and system & tools.