Datapipe, a leading global provider of managed hosting and cloud services for the enterprise, has led the cloud migration and digital transformation of China’s largest brand eCommerce 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 per cent, reducing the cost of hosting by 20 per cent, 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 per cent, enabling Baozun to guarantee a 99.95 per cent 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 eCommerce solutions to more-than 100 international 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 eCommerce sites on China’s most popular online marketplaces, such as Alibaba’s 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, VP of Asia at Datapipe says Baozun has hundreds of global business partners, spanning millions of customers and transactions.

“Given the scope of its operations, ‎and the unique nature of eCommerce in China, where some days have 1000-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 per cent scalable cloud environment and providing management of their infrastructure 24×7.

“With their IT now supporting their ever-growing business, Baozun is better positioned to take aim at the multi-trillion dollar eCommerce 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 business’ rapid growth, because as transactions volumes grew, so too did the server load; consequently, server sizes increased, placing significant pressure on its IT team around maintenance, cost, speed and scale.

Tony Wu, CTO at Baozun, says Datapipe came highly recommended. “They brought significant expertise in managing cloud environments – including for other large eCommerce ‎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 surpassed the US last year to become the world’s largest retail eCommerce market, and is expected to cross US$1.21 trillion in retail eCommerce sales in 2017, according to eMarketer. While eCommerce is growing strongly, running an eCommerce 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 eCommerce transformation of Challenger Technologies Limited, Singapore’s largest electronics retailer. Read that story on Inside Retail Singapore. The company is seeing rapid growth across Asia-Pacific. It has doubled regional manpower year-on-year, with close to 100 employees now in Hong Kong and double the customer base in the region.

Datapipe is the managed hosting and cloud services provider with the most complete set of services, global locations, and industry leading partners. Datapipe delivers choice, control and confidence in architecting, deploying, and managing multi-platform hybrid IT solutions tailored to individual customer needs. Optimising mission-critical and day-to-day enterprise IT operations, Datapipe enables businesses to transform, innovate, and scale. Backed by a global team of experienced professionals and next-generation data centers Datapipe provides comprehensive security, governance, orchestration, and analytics solutions.