Caleffi China
Multi-Cloud Infrastructure.

A multi-cloud infrastructure to optimize Caleffi’s digital presence in China, guaranteeing an experience fully equivalent to that of other countries in the world.

20 DaysICP Filing procedure completed for China

At a glance

The project in brief

Objective: Optimize the brand’s digital presence in China by increasing general performance, improve the user experience and the editorial experience of the Caleffi editors present in China, from a multi-cloud and future-proof perspective.
Key result: 20 DaysICP Filing procedure completed for China

Client: Caleffi China
Sector: Manufacturing
Project: Multi-Cloud Infrastructure
What we did: Cloud infrastructure design
Technologies: Drupal
PHP
Multi-country
Alibaba Cloud
ICP Filing
CDN

The client

Caleffi China

Caleffi Hydronic Solutions is a leader in the production of components for heating, air conditioning, plumbing and renewable energy systems, for civil and industrial users, and in the supply of cutting-edge system solutions.

Today it has over 1300 employees distributed between the Italian headquarters and foreign branches, markets in over 90 countries and in 2018 recorded a turnover of 329 million euros.

Over the years, a fruitful and virtuous collaboration has developed between Caleffi and SparkFabrik which has led to tackling many projects and many challenges together, including the creation and management of the multi-country software platform based on Drupal for the management of the corporate site.

The challenge

Today, China is one of the most digitally connected markets in the world: 40% of the Chinese population, approximately 580 million consumers, shop online and almost 38% buy products and services outside China. The Chinese market not only offers enormous potential for Italian products and services, but plays a strategic role in digital, an area in which new technology, consumption and business models are emerging.

The presence of Caleffi Hydronic Solutions in China in 2019 reached 20 years of activity confirming the strategic importance of this market in the present and above all in the future.

The achievement and guarantee of a digital experience in China fully equivalent to that of other countries in the world in terms of efficiency, security, content control and usability, overcoming the infrastructural and technological obstacles that the Chinese market today represents, was therefore the new challenge.

In particular, the focus of Caleffi Hydronic Solutions was aimed on the one hand at improving the positioning of the Caleffi brand in the Chinese digital market, offering a user experience on the web equal to or superior to that of local competitors, on the other to have a reactive and easily updatable platform even from the Chinese territory.

What we did

The work, step by step.

01

The solution

We have helped Caleffi Hydronic Solutions to face these problems offering technological, consultancy and operational solutions, and giving them the opportunity to exercise full control of Chinese digital properties from the Italian Headquarters, leaving, however, full autonomy management at the branch.

Consulting process, ICP filing

To host your applications on a server located in China, the fulfillment of some bureaucratic procedures is essential. In the case of Caleffi Hydronic Solutions, ICP Filing and PSB registration have been identified as the necessary steps.

Through the SparkFabrik consultancy services, the ICP Filing procedure - a bureaucratic process divided into several phases with a procedure that can be complex and time consuming if you are not followed in the various phases by a partner with due experience - was successfully completed in just 20 days.

Map showing Caleffi locations around the world

Subsequently, registration was made with the Public Security Bureau (PSB) of the Internet Security Administration Service Platform of the National Public Security Bureau of China, in order to request verification of the contents of one’s website by the supervisory body for public safety.

Infrastructure: multi-cloud strategy and PaaS

As part of a global digital strategy aimed at promoting portability and flexibility, winning options when facing new business opportunities in which speed, business continuity and cost optimization are crucial, SparkFabrik had already managed the migration of the Caleffi Hydronic Solutions application infrastructure to the Cloud, with a development and implementation approach based on best practices known as The Twelve-Factor App methodology, oriented towards the development of software as a service application.

The new step in implementing the strategy consisted in the creation of a multi-cloud High Availability platform, supplied in “as a Service” mode, accompanied by SparkFabrik Cloud DevOps Platform™.

SparkFabrik Cloud DevOps Platform™ is SparkFabrik’s workflow management platform for the automation of Continuous Integration and Continuous delivery processes multi-environment, Application Profiling and Monitoring and integrated Agile issue tracking.

Diagram showing the cloud infrastructure of Caleffi Hydronic Solutions

Results

What changed.

20 DaysICP Filing procedure completed for China
Multi-CloudInfrastructure on Alibaba Cloud + Google Cloud Platform
High AvailabilityPaaS platform with guaranteed business continuity
20 YearsCaleffi's consolidated presence in the Chinese market

The story

The left part of the figure below summarizes the metrics relating to access to the digital properties of Caleffi Hydronic Solutions from the territory of China before the implementation of the SparkFabrik platform.

They were obtained using LOOKATME Analytics™, a performance measurement tool created by SparkFabrik to give companies a clear view of how users/customers based in China can access their digital properties.

These are fairly typical metrics for accessing sites or applications hosted in Europe from Chinese territory.

With these values, updating the existing platform from the Chinese territory turns out to be rather frustrating, if not almost impossible, and access by users/customers extremely difficult (statistically around 53% of visits by mobile users are abandoned if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load).

With the transition to the multi-cloud strategy and the Chinese instance on the new infrastructure, the new performance indicators on access from the Chinese territory (visible on the right side of the figure below) show an improvement equal to + 196%, going from a global performance index of 20 to the current 90.

In addition, any features developed for the global site are potentially available simultaneously on the Chinese site, thanks to SparkFabrik Cloud DevOps Platform™, which allows you to simultaneously bring platform updates to all multi-regional instances cloud.
The positive feedback collected by Chinese site administrators also followed, for whom ‘updating the platform is now a pleasure’.