Datapipe, a global leading provider of managed hosting and cloud services for the enterprise, has led the cloud migration and digital transformation of China’s largest brand e-commerce services provider Baozun Inc.
Baozun has shifted its IT systems to Datapipe’s managed cloud, tapping Datapipe’s expertise as a Managed Services Provider to handle its cloud migration and maintenance.
Results include decreasing the time to on-board new clients by 500 percent, reducing the cost of hosting by 20 percent, reducing maintenance from 200 man hours to virtually zero, freeing Baozun’s IT team of over 20 employees to focus on core business activities.
Datapipe also reduced Baozun’s server downtime to zero percent, enabling Baozun to guarantee a 99.95 percent uptime to its clients – which include over 100 global brands in over 50 countries.
With operations across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the rest of Asia Pacific, Baozun offers end-to-end brand e-commerce solutions to more-than 100 international brand clients. These include brands in the apparel, appliances, electronics, home and furnishing, food and health, cosmetics, insurance and automobile categories.
Baozun helps these companies operate e-commerce sites on China’s most popular online marketplaces, such as Alibaba-owned Tmall and JD.com. Key to ensuring their clients’ success is the ability for Baozun to provide scalable, highly available and secure end to end solutions integrating front end shopping experiences with supply chain management and distribution systems.
Colin Chan, Vice President of Asia at Datapipe said, “Baozun has hundreds of global business partners, spanning millions of customers and transactions.
Given the scope of its operations, and the unique nature of e-commerce in China, where some days have a thousand times the transaction and visitor numbers than others, the challenge of ensuring infrastructure is able to scale up to meet business demand is very real.
We’re pleased to work with Baozun, by migrating their core workloads to a 100% scalable cloud environment and providing management of their infrastructure 24X7. With their IT now supporting their ever growing business Baozun is better positioned to take aim at the multi-trillion dollar e-commerce opportunity in China and Asia wide.
Prior to working with Datapipe, all of Baozun’s data ran on web servers hosted externally — unsustainable given the businesses’ rapid growth. As the business grew, so too did the server load; consequentially server sizes increased, placing significant pressure on its IT team around maintenance, cost, speed and scale.
Tony Wu, Chief Technology Officer at Baozun, said, “Datapipe came highly recommended. They brought significant expertise in managing cloud environments – including for other large e-commerce businesses in China. They delivered a high-level of customer support, were very affordable and are able to provide open source as well as private cloud services to meet our unique needs. By Datapipe managing our cloud deployment, Baozun is able to focus on other crucial technology processes, accelerating our growth and delivering shareholder value.”
China’s retail e-commerce market is fast growing. The country surpassed the US in 2015 to become the world’s largest retail e-commerce market, and is expected to cross US$1.21 trillion in retail e-commerce sales in 2017, according to eMarketer. While e-commerce is growing strongly, running an e-commerce business comes with its own set of unique challenges, particularly around scale.
When online promotions are launched, for example, Baozun sees significant spikes in sales volumes – up to 100x that of a normal day. On Singles Day in 2015 (11 November), Baozun processed 650,000 orders in the first hour and 3.5 million orders within a span of 24 hours.
Datapipe recently drove the e-commerce transformation of Challenger Technologies Limited (SGX:573), Singapore’s largest electronics retailer. The company is seeing rapid growth across Asia-Pacific (APAC). It has doubled regional manpower year-on-year (YoY), with close to 100 employees now in its Hong Kong office as well as doubling the number of customers’ YoY in region.
