A move to the cloud boosts scalability and security of e-commerce IT environment.

If you build it, they will come. Especially if what you build serves a real-world need. That’s certainly been true in the case of Fulljaus. As with many startups, the concept for our company started with a problem we encountered in our everyday work—and an idea for how to fix it.

It began when a computer components retail company wanted to streamline and optimize processes for selling its products through multiple online marketplaces. At the time, employees had to manually enter product, process, or policy changes into the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and within each individual marketplace, which was labor intensive and vulnerable to errors.

To address this challenge, we developed middleware that connected the company’s ERP system to the backend systems of the various marketplaces, enabling administrators to make product updates, pricing adjustments, and inventory management via a single interface. Within three months, we were able to scale the business across three times the number of marketplaces, tripling overall sales.

Based on our success and input from our partners, we realized that other suppliers facing similar challenges could also benefit from the platform. A new company, Fulljaus, was born.

More than a business relationship

Our initial offering was a sales platform—the Multichannel Manager—that suppliers could use to manage their products across multiple digital channels. Initially, we operated the business using servers on-premises. As we gained new customers and marketplaces, we needed a more scalable, secure IT environment from which to run our business. After briefly working with a local cloud provider that couldn’t fully meet our growth requirements, we decided to migrate our IT environment to the IBM Cloud.

IBM Cloud Services provided a one-stop shop approach that addressed both our IT and business needs. We had previously participated in a startup contest sponsored in part by IBM and had gotten to know some of the IBM representatives. From the beginning, the IBM team worked side-by-side with us, acting as partners in helping us strategically grow our business.

First, the IBM team designed a cloud-based architecture to deliver our e-commerce platform-as-a-service offering, and we were able to migrate our VMware workloads to the cloud. IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions created a flexible and manageable server infrastructure that can scale as the company grows, while the IBM Service Manager for Smart Business software helps optimize IT management.

Preparation for an AI future

Today, Fulljaus has expanded its offerings to include a Seller Center—a platform that enables e-commerce firms to evolve into marketplaces. This solution enables companies that have their own products to expand to include third-party products via online marketplaces.

Our partnership with IBM continues to thrive and grow. Next on the horizon is building artificial intelligence into our offerings. We’re looking into ways we can use IBM Watson to make complex decisions based on large volumes of data. For example, Watson could analyze the time of day with the highest number of sales for a product in a particular marketplace and automatically adjust pricing for that time based on its findings.

From the beginning, our relationship with IBM has been about more than technology. IBM has believed in our business model and has been a true partner in our success. We’re excited to explore the next phase of our future together.

Learn more about IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions.