The main objective of the ONE project is to enrich Digital Business Ecosystems with an open, decentralised negotiation environment and enabling tools that will allow organisations to create contract agreements for supplying complex, integrated services as a virtual
organisation/coalition.

The project is especially geared towards SMEs, providing them with a trusted, secure and free of charge technological environment through which they can create the tactical and strategic alliances to pursue business opportunities and growth. To be competitive in Digital Ecosystems SMEs will need to develop alliances and collaborate to provide joint service offerings and also address large tenders.

Current negotiation platforms, such as Business-to-Business electronic marketplaces and Internet trading platforms are centrally managed, not fully trusted by SMEs and/or too expensive and hence not widely used by European SMEs today. Without the support of proper tools, SMEs cannot easily find trustworthy partners to provide services or be found themselves. Access to reputation information is not readily available and negotiations are time consuming.

To solve these problems, a negotiation environment must be affordable, open, not centrally controlled, support the sharing of knowledge via flexible security and trust policies and be able to learn and adapt to real user negotiation strategies and to changing market conditions. ONE provides such a solution via an open-source approach ensuring transparency and sustainability. By using the ONE environment all business players (SMEs, Corporations and others) will benefit from reduction of time to market and transaction costs.

The ONE environment will also provide wider ecosystem benefits in terms of an increase in the number of participants; better negotiation performance and collaboration while creating new business opportunities.