Baozun moves to the cloud, taps multi-trillion dollar e-com industry

Alibaba-backed Chinese brand e-commerce services provider, Baozun, has moved to the cloud with Datapipe, a global provider of managed hosting and cloud services for enterprises. 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.

According to Datapipe, Baozun has decreased 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. It has been able to free Baozun’s IT team of over 20 employees to focus on core business activities, reducing Baozun’s server downtime to zero percent, enabling it to guarantee a 99.95 per cent uptime to its clients.

Baozun operates across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the rest of Asia Pacific and offers end-to-end brand e-commerce solutions to more-than 100 international brand clients across 50 countries. Clients ranging from apparel, appliances, electronics to home and furnishing, food and health, cosmetics, insurance and automobile, are a part of Baozun’s portfolio. The company helps these brands operate e-commerce sites on Chinese online marketplaces, such as Alibaba-owned Tmall and JD.com by providing scalable, available and secure end to end solutions integrating front end shopping experiences with supply chain management and distribution systems.

Colin Chan, Vice President, Asia, 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 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.”

Chan adds that Datapipe is migrating Baozun’s core workloads to a 100 per cent scalable cloud environment and providing management of their infrastructure 24×7. With the IT now supporting the growing business, Baozun is better positioned to take aim at the multi-trillion dollar e-commerce opportunity in China and Asia.

Before the partnership with Datapipe, Baozun ran its data on web servers hosted externally which according to the company were unsustainable given the rapidly growing businesses. The business growth directly implied the growth of server load and server sizes, putting pressure on its IT team around maintenance, cost, speed and scale.

Tony Wu, Chief Technology Officer, Baozun, says, “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.”

According to eMarketer; retail e-commerce market is fast growing in China and has surpassed the US last year to become the world’s largest retail e-commerce market, and is expected to cross $1.21 trillion in retail e-commerce sales in 2017. Hence, with the growth of e-commerce had led to the surfacing of various challenges attached to it, particularly around scale. For example, when online promotions are launched, Baozun sees significant spikes in sales volumes up to 100 times that of a normal day. According to the company, on Singles Day, November 11, 2015; 650,000 orders were processes in the first hour and 3.5 million orders within a span of 24 hours.

With Datapipe leading Baozun’s digital transformation; the e-commerce service provider will be able to optimize mission-critical and day-to-day enterprise IT operations, and will be enabled to transform, innovate and scale. Recently Datapipe drove the e-commerce transformation of Singapore’s largest electronic retailer Challenger Technologies. The company is seeing rapid growth across Asia-Pacific and has doubled regional manpower year-on-year, with close to 100 employees now in its Hong Kong office as well as doubling the number of customers’ YoY in region.