China Mobile Zhejiang begins its journey to cloud native
Wang Xiaozheng discusses China Mobile Zhejiang's digital transformation strategy and how the move to cloud native is a cornerstone for improving IT delivery capability, innovation and efficiency.
24 Feb 2021
China Mobile Zhejiang begins its journey to cloud native
Wang Xiaozheng discusses China Mobile Zhejiang's digital transformation strategy and how the move to cloud native is a cornerstone for improving IT delivery capability, innovation and efficiency.
How does your IT strategy enable your organization’s enterprise-wide business transformation?
In the digital era, technology innovation and business growth for new businesses are greatly compressed, which disrupts the traditional operating model. Innovation and development in this era is critical. Factors such as IT organization, perception, culture, methodologies and models also need to be reshaped to lower the cost of trial and error in business, and provide flexible and efficient support for rapid development.
Zhejiang Mobile, a subsidiary of China Mobile and the first of it’s provincial companies to achieve cloud native level 3 based on the group’s Cloud Native Maturity Assessment, was also the first to establish the integration of big data, AI product development and business operations. In recent years, we have adhered to the main target of creating customer value with a combination of business and digital technology. In particular, the architectural innovation and independent control based on the cloud native concept is an important cornerstone for us in improving IT delivery capability and efficiency. This lets us achieve system stability and cost control, and adapt to market changes and innovation to give full play to AI, big data, cloud native and other technologies.
What are the biggest challenges you face in achieving your IT transformation?
Zhejiang Mobile's business support system has grown over time from simple to complex, with more and more functions. This causes issues such as a complex process for developing requirements, development inefficiency, difficulty in application deployment and release, poor system scalability, difficulty dealing with anomalies, inefficient operations and maintenance, and difficulty in locating faults. Therefore, our biggest challenge has been to build a system that meets the strategic requirements of the company's fully converged consumer mobile, government and enterprise business plus emerging markets, and continues to promote the company's digital transformation to become increasingly agile and nimble.
What are the main challenges of moving your core IT to the cloud, and are you using public or private cloud?
Moving to the cloud is the strategic direction of Zhejiang Mobile, but the move to X86-based blade servers and virtualization are not equivalent to cloudification. We are still in the early stage of becoming cloud native. The biggest challenge is to achieve infrastructure standardization, a distributed architecture, “Capability as a Service”, agile delivery and intelligent operations while maintaining the quality of IT service delivery.
Regarding choice of cloud platform, we carried out targeted deployment according to the needs of different business systems. For business support systems and other internally-oriented systems, we mainly chose to deploy in a self-built private cloud, while in the government and enterprise cloud, we chose to deploy in the public cloud.
How are Open APIs and a cloud-native architecture enabling speed and agility in your architecture?
The core competitiveness of an enterprise is shifting from the traditional pursuit of efficiency to an ability to adapt to market changes and innovation in an agile fashion. From 2015 to 2019, Zhejiang Mobile completed the transformation of its middle-office IT architecture, and built technical capabilities including a containerized cloud platform, microservices platform and DevOps platform. At the same time, we transformed the core business support system with cloud, microservices and container technologies, and established a series of middle-office competence centers.
In June 2019, Zhejiang Mobile achieved the first fully container-based BSS/OSS core system in the telecoms industry. At its peak, the scale of application containers exceeded 40,000, with more than 60 million customer-related services in stable operation. In July 2020, based on the container cloud, microservices, and DevOps technologies, the overall gray-scale release capability of the CRM system was realized, greatly reducing the risk of launching the system during the day-time, and without the IT delivery process adversely affecting customer experience, which was an important step towards achieving the group’s cloud-native maturity rating.
What are your three internal priorities for the rest of the year and why?
Firstly, to promote the end-to-end support capacity building of new technologies such as 5G private networks and mobile clouds. The trend of cross-industry partnering in digital services has become more apparent; new market dynamics call for new support models. It is necessary to encourage senior business managers to participate in IT projects; continue to digitize production methods; innovate and promote the construction of new business, convergent business and other support capabilities; and actively promote synergies where possible upstream and downstream of the industrial value chain.
A second priority is to speed up the construction of enterprise-level data integration capabilities, and to promote the effective integration and reasonable control of enterprise-level data assets. Through the integration of the 5G network, government and enterprise cloud, and other aspects of data, the real-time data processing capabilities will improve. IT needs to move from passively supporting the business to actively empowering business operations and lead the digital transformation of various business units of the enterprise.
A third priority is to launch an intelligent process automation capability-sharing platform that integrates AI and robotic process automation to accelerate the application of new AI technology to enable business innovation and continue to prepare "digital employees" for government and enterprise, finance, procurement, operations and maintenance, customer service, human resources and other fields.
Read our full series of interviews with digital transformation leaders from around the world, and learn more about their stories and experiences.
How does your IT strategy enable your organization’s enterprise-wide business transformation?
In the digital era, technology innovation and business growth for new businesses are greatly compressed, which disrupts the traditional operating model. Innovation and development in this era is critical. Factors such as IT organization, perception, culture, methodologies and models also need to be reshaped to lower the cost of trial and error in business, and provide flexible and efficient support for rapid development.
Zhejiang Mobile, a subsidiary of China Mobile and the first of it’s provincial companies to achieve cloud native level 3 based on the group’s Cloud Native Maturity Assessment, was also the first to establish the integration of big data, AI product development and business operations. In recent years, we have adhered to the main target of creating customer value with a combination of business and digital technology. In particular, the architectural innovation and independent control based on the cloud native concept is an important cornerstone for us in improving IT delivery capability and efficiency. This lets us achieve system stability and cost control, and adapt to market changes and innovation to give full play to AI, big data, cloud native and other technologies.
What are the biggest challenges you face in achieving your IT transformation?
Zhejiang Mobile's business support system has grown over time from simple to complex, with more and more functions. This causes issues such as a complex process for developing requirements, development inefficiency, difficulty in application deployment and release, poor system scalability, difficulty dealing with anomalies, inefficient operations and maintenance, and difficulty in locating faults. Therefore, our biggest challenge has been to build a system that meets the strategic requirements of the company's fully converged consumer mobile, government and enterprise business plus emerging markets, and continues to promote the company's digital transformation to become increasingly agile and nimble.
What are the main challenges of moving your core IT to the cloud, and are you using public or private cloud?
Moving to the cloud is the strategic direction of Zhejiang Mobile, but the move to X86-based blade servers and virtualization are not equivalent to cloudification. We are still in the early stage of becoming cloud native. The biggest challenge is to achieve infrastructure standardization, a distributed architecture, “Capability as a Service”, agile delivery and intelligent operations while maintaining the quality of IT service delivery.
Regarding choice of cloud platform, we carried out targeted deployment according to the needs of different business systems. For business support systems and other internally-oriented systems, we mainly chose to deploy in a self-built private cloud, while in the government and enterprise cloud, we chose to deploy in the public cloud.
How are Open APIs and a cloud-native architecture enabling speed and agility in your architecture?
The core competitiveness of an enterprise is shifting from the traditional pursuit of efficiency to an ability to adapt to market changes and innovation in an agile fashion. From 2015 to 2019, Zhejiang Mobile completed the transformation of its middle-office IT architecture, and built technical capabilities including a containerized cloud platform, microservices platform and DevOps platform. At the same time, we transformed the core business support system with cloud, microservices and container technologies, and established a series of middle-office competence centers.
In June 2019, Zhejiang Mobile achieved the first fully container-based BSS/OSS core system in the telecoms industry. At its peak, the scale of application containers exceeded 40,000, with more than 60 million customer-related services in stable operation. In July 2020, based on the container cloud, microservices, and DevOps technologies, the overall gray-scale release capability of the CRM system was realized, greatly reducing the risk of launching the system during the day-time, and without the IT delivery process adversely affecting customer experience, which was an important step towards achieving the group’s cloud-native maturity rating.
What are your three internal priorities for the rest of the year and why?
Firstly, to promote the end-to-end support capacity building of new technologies such as 5G private networks and mobile clouds. The trend of cross-industry partnering in digital services has become more apparent; new market dynamics call for new support models. It is necessary to encourage senior business managers to participate in IT projects; continue to digitize production methods; innovate and promote the construction of new business, convergent business and other support capabilities; and actively promote synergies where possible upstream and downstream of the industrial value chain.
A second priority is to speed up the construction of enterprise-level data integration capabilities, and to promote the effective integration and reasonable control of enterprise-level data assets. Through the integration of the 5G network, government and enterprise cloud, and other aspects of data, the real-time data processing capabilities will improve. IT needs to move from passively supporting the business to actively empowering business operations and lead the digital transformation of various business units of the enterprise.
A third priority is to launch an intelligent process automation capability-sharing platform that integrates AI and robotic process automation to accelerate the application of new AI technology to enable business innovation and continue to prepare "digital employees" for government and enterprise, finance, procurement, operations and maintenance, customer service, human resources and other fields.
Read our full series of interviews with digital transformation leaders from around the world, and learn more about their stories and experiences.
