ONe Powers Ecommerce Growth and International Expansion with Unity Group and AWS

ONe had ambitious growth plans and needed a flexible and scalable infrastructure to support multiple customers in multiple countries. With support from AWS Partner Unity Group, ONe built a system on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver on its strategy to profitably scale throughout its current market region and beyond.

Based in Poland, ONe provides software as a service (SaaS) to help B2B wholesalers and distributors sell more online and to support their digital transformation programs.

ONe had previously implemented other popular ecommerce systems but the process was always expensive and required customization. This presented a business opportunity: to start a company that develops and owns the software to support digital transformation for the sector.

ONe was looking for an efficient and cost-effective way to serve multiple clients. Working with Unity Group, an AWS Partner this was made possible using AWS.

Since 2019, ONe has grown steadily with support from Unity Group, which has helped ONe to scale for new customers, introduced it to markets across borders, and helped lower the cost of taking on more clients. All this has put ONe in a strong position to scale its services throughout Central and Eastern Europe and beyond—its strategy is to go global as soon as possible.

ONe has grown from three clients in Poland to 15 customers across the country, as well as in Hungary, Lithuania, and Romania. It was looking to expand while avoiding on-premises hardware investments or co-location services.

ONe chose to build its platform on AWS because it was scalable and efficient. “We needed to be experts in cloud solutions for our customers,” says Adrian Hrehorowicz, chief technology officer at ONe. “We wanted to build a team of cloud experts. AWS offered us a broad range of functionality as well as the stability and security we knew we needed.”

Using AWS, ONe built a subscription-based platform that includes a user-friendly ecommerce storefront where its clients’ customers can submit orders online. It also provides a trader panel featuring offer and order creation; real-time negotiation with customers that are logged in on an ecommerce storefront; functionality for management of prices and products.

The SaaS relies on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for scalable, relational databases. AWS Lambda delivers serverless computing which helps ONe to create, manage, and update infrastructure resources. “AWS was the obvious starting point for the architecture,” says Ryszard Łach, head of cloud infrastructure at Unity Group. “We knew it would be flexible, secure, and scalable enough to help us achieve our ambitions for ONe.”

ONe’s typical customers are B2B wholesalers which, up until now, have been wholly offline, or with very basic ecommerce sales operations that account for only a small proportion of total revenues. Customers that have transformed from mainly wholesale models to fully functioning ecommerce businesses include Daniella Villamosság, a leader in the distribution of electrotechnical materials in the Hungarian market, and Euroterm, which has focused on the distribution of heating and installation systems in Poland for 20 years.

ONe’s software is built with open API and add-on features, with which client IT departments or other software houses can create additional business tools, based on ONe-like product configurators and loyalty programs, for example.

Simplicity of billing is an important feature for ONe’s customers, enabling them to buy subscriptions in a pay-as-you-go model. Prices vary depending on the number of orders made and the scale of services used.

ONe has also benefited from the fast deployment of AWS components, including ready-to-play security from AWS, or from independent providers through AWS Marketplace. Access control gives access to particular engineers without unnecessary risks, while load balancers provide stability and elasticity, which means the system can scale up or down on demand. “Running tests is a cost-effective route to innovation,” says Hrehorowicz. “With AWS, we can run as many tests as we want, without incurring high costs.”

Most of ONe’s 47-strong workforce are technical staff. “We recruit people who are often admins with a sound fundamental IT knowledge,” says Hrehorowicz. “They are attracted to us by the opportunity to work with AWS, with cloud technologies, and to approach DevOps in that way too.”

ONe also offers a client onboarding experience that is faster than the 12-18 months that is common for on-premises models. Clients can become tenants on the system within 24 hours, and full integration is possible in just 3 months.