How China’s Telecom Giants Accelerate IT Efficiency with DevOps Maturity Models

Amid large‑scale digital transformation, enterprises are adopting DevOps to boost IT efficiency. The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, provides strong guidance, helping industry leaders integrate resources, improve IT capabilities, and better support business systems.

Participating Telecom Companies and Project Count

China Unicom, China Mobile, China Telecom, Huawei, China Tower, and ZTE together contributed 17 projects evaluated through the DevOps maturity model.

Continuous Delivery (Standard 3) Compliance

Zhejiang Mobile – OSS 4.0 Capability Center Performance Center

Built on the OSS 4.0 architecture, the performance center unifies data ingestion, modeling, and computation to support business analytics, and decouples applications for rapid development.

During DevOps transformation, Zhejiang Mobile defined a "4321" model (four layers, three teams, two lines, one integration) and a five‑step migration process covering organization, technology, process, and culture.

Beijing Mobile – E‑Commerce System & Centralized Performance Management System

The e‑commerce system, built on the self‑developed AiDo platform, combines visual metrics, pipeline orchestration, and layered automated testing to improve development efficiency and delivery quality.

The performance management system applies micro‑service decoupling and container deployment, leveraging a "thick middle‑platform, thin application" approach, data‑mid‑platform, and technology‑mid‑platform to provide reusable capabilities for network assurance and performance analysis.

Jiangsu Mobile – Alading Marketing Enablement Project

After achieving Continuous Delivery Standard 3, the team improved all seven sub‑domains, shortening delivery cycles by 45%, reducing change lead time by 50%, lowering failure rate below 5%, cutting build time to ~5 minutes, raising automated test coverage to 100%, and enabling on‑demand releases.

China Mobile Software – China Mobile Sentiment (中移舆情) Project

This application collects web data, performs cleaning, governance, and AI analysis, delivering intelligence‑style reports to users.

China Telecom – Intelligent Pre‑Processing System

The platform integrates network operation capabilities and data, unifying data orchestration to output fault segments and diagnostic reports for upper‑layer applications, following DevOps standards.

China Unicom – One‑Card Recharge Project

Standardized interfaces across 31 provinces unified "one‑card" management, reduced redundant development, lowered software heterogeneity, and, combined with DevOps, significantly cut management costs and improve development efficiency.

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

The ESOP portal consolidates multiple business platforms, providing a unified service center and improving delivery cycles (‑25% demand cycle, ‑50% version cycle), integration efficiency (+300%), and automated test coverage (95%).

China Tower – Master Data Management Module

The module establishes standards and governance for master data (organizations, personnel, assets, etc.), exposing 115 interfaces, serving 46 internal systems, and handling ~30 GB of data.

Technical Operations (Standard 4) Compliance

Beijing Mobile – CRM Order Center Project

The order center, built on a k8s and Mesos+Marathon cloud‑native architecture with OpenStack virtualization, supports elastic scaling, service governance (rate limiting, circuit breaking, domain isolation), and provides comprehensive service listings and control.

Systems and Tools (Standard 8) Compliance

Zhejiang Mobile – Bee Cloud Energy Efficiency Platform

The platform aligns with Zhejiang Mobile’s internal release control requirements, integrating configuration management, automated build, and deployment through internal micro‑service management, achieving one‑stop rapid publishing.

China Telecom – Integrated Biyi Collaborative Development Platform

Based on micro‑services, the platform integrates Jenkins, Nexus, Harbor, SonarQube, and customizes Jenkins pipelines for visual editing and full‑process monitoring, delivering a cloud‑native, end‑to‑end software lifecycle management solution.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and major financial, telecom, and internet enterprises, is the first comprehensive domestic and international DevOps standard. It has been approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading firms. In July 2020, the standard was officially concluded by the ITU‑T, 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 Systems & Tools.