How Guangdong Mobile’s CRM Achieved Leading DevOps Operational Maturity

DevOps Standard Assessment Success

On December 26, 2022, the China Information & Communication Research Institute announced the latest batch of DevOps standard assessment results. Guangdong Mobile’s CRM project passed the technical‑operation 2+ level, reaching a domestic leading level.

Project Overview

The CRM system supports customer management, product management, channel management, sales and order management, covering 21 cities in Guangdong, about 130 million personal users and over 20 million broadband users, handling more than 90 billion calls per month.

Q&A with Chen Hui, Deputy General Manager of Guangdong Mobile Information Systems

Project details: The CRM platform is Guangdong Mobile’s core, most complex business support system, integrating customer, product, channel, sales, and order functions.

Feelings on passing assessment: Achieving the 2+ level is a milestone; it demonstrates high‑level DevOps integration, improved stability, safety, reliability, efficiency, and user experience.

Why choose this project for evaluation: Selecting the most representative, complex CRM system allowed a thorough test of monitoring, incident, change, configuration, capacity, high‑availability, business continuity, and user‑experience management capabilities.

Improvements after assessment: The team enhanced DevOps understanding, addressed capacity‑cost management gaps, introduced containerization, micro‑services, multi‑dimensional capacity forecasting, and knowledge‑graph‑driven operations, raising overall intelligent operation levels.

Technical architecture: The system uses a two‑site dual‑center design for disaster recovery, front‑back separation, multi‑end services, X86, containerization, clustering, and a Prometheus‑based PaaS monitoring platform with elastic compute for peak loads.

Evaluation process: The assessment covered 35 capability domains and 113 improvement points; the team conducted multiple self‑evaluations, gap analyses, and iterative improvements over nearly a year.

Impact of DevOps standards: The standards provide clear guidance, help identify gaps, and drive continuous improvement, enhancing operational efficiency and quality.

Future plans: The team aims to pursue higher‑level DevOps standards, consolidate processes, tools, and specifications, and promote the practices across other IT systems.

DevOps outlook: DevOps is seen as a lean‑practice implementation that improves IT efficiency and quality; with rapid tech evolution, DevOps concepts are becoming easier to adopt across projects.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, led by the China Information & Communication Research Institute with contributions from major internet, telecom, and financial enterprises, is the first comprehensive DevOps series standard in China and the world’s first ITU‑T recognized DevOps international standard. It covers process (agile development, continuous delivery, technical operation), application design, security and risk management, system and tools, business value management, collaborative development‑operations, and continuous testing.