Services for Renewable Energy
32 employees
Cleartrace is an energy data and carbon platform providing companies with the digital infrastructure to reduce risk, enable decision-making to mitigate environmental risk, prove their climate achievements and create new market opportunities within the evolving energy landscape. Serving both energy suppliers and corporate energy buyers, Cleartraceâs customers include JPMorgan Chase, Brookfield Renewable, and Iron Mountain among others.
When first getting started as a business, Cleartrace originally built a custom authentication system with a founding team of three engineers and a sales rep. The tool was simple⌠an application database on the backend and around 200 lines of node.js sitting in front of it. The result was a standard authentication process:
In order to add users, an engineer would need to run a simple script and put the users in a database.
This simple tool just worked, so it went mostly untouched except for security updates. No one was worried about additional identity features.
It was simple…until someone without an engineering background needed to use it.
âThis was built when we were originally three engineers and a sales guy. Why would you build a UI for controlling identity? But as we added customers and complexity grew, things turned into a bit of a messâ – Brad, Senior Director of Technology, Cleartrace
Jessica, Director of Customer Success, did not have a technical background. She and her teamcouldnât run scripts to add users, so they needed to enlist engineering. Suddenly authenticationand identity management became a bottleneck to Cleartraceâs growth.
As Cleartrace brought in larger customers the homegrown authentication solution required constant troubleshooting.
âWe would run into issues that we didnât know how to handle in customer success. We would basically drop everything and loop in our support engineers to help us troubleshoot what was going on. It sucked a lot of time from other people.â Jessica, Director of Customer Success, Cleartrace
A common issue experienced by the customer success team was trouble adding users. The team would give a demo to a client and attempt to provision access to that new user only to find they were unable to do so. It could take up to two days before a user was able to access their account.
âThe tool that we built internally worked for simple scenarios. However, it was often challenging with larger customers if they wanted to add a bunch of users at one time.. We were not able to meet the needs and demands of some of our larger clients with the existing solution.â – Jessica, Director of Customer Success, Cleartrace
As Cleartrace brought in larger clients with more complex needs, identity became a blocker for servicing customers and scaling without adding headcount.
âWe saw large customers assessing our identity management capabilities. In order for our big customers to go live in production, they had to have things like SSO, MFA, audit logs, and a way to interface with user management.â Brad, Senior Director of Technology, Cleartrace
The Cleartrace team realized that the company needed to invest in its identity management capabilities, and there were two options on the table. Build it. Or buy it.
The team estimated that in order to build an updated identity tool they would need to assign two engineers for three months to the project. This proposed identity update would be a bare minimum solution to meet the requirements of these larger customers. However, it was likely to not meet the needs of the customer success team.
âThe initial project plan didnât include the whole scope of everything the customer success team needed. It would have made their lives a bit easier, but engineers would still be needed to add new features to the identity tool after the initial project.â – Brad, Senior Director of Technology, Cleartrace
In hindsight, in order for Jessicaâs team to reach the level of functionality the customer success team needed, it would have taken an additional four months of effort when resources were committed to other priorities. The team decided that engineeringâs time was best spent on higher priority items.
When Cleatrace decided to use Frontegg for a modern identity platform, the engineering team spent roughly six weeks configuring their applications to prepare for the Frontegg migration.
When the applications were ready, Brad expected the user migration to be a nightmare. He instead found that Frontegg offered a simple user migration path.
âThe initial migration of existing user accounts to Frontegg was really quick, we finished in a day. I had budgeted two weeks for the migration and had even stood up backup instances of our previous solution in case something went wrong, but I didnât need any of it.â
Frontegg gives Cleatrace modern identity and is constantly adding new features to help support Cleartraceâs customers.
âWithout Frontegg we wouldnât have had the capacity to deliver new authentication features to Jessicaâs team. We have huge projects coming up and likely wouldnât get to all of the success teamâs requests. We donât have to sit in a room and debate which identity capabilities we can afford to spend time on. Frontegg has taken a huge burden off of us.â – Brad, Senior Director of Technology, Cleartrace
Frontegg has empowered Jessica to provide advanced identity features to her customers. Instead of needing to approach the engineering team, Jessica is able to work directly with Frontegg support to enable features for her clients.
âPersonally thereâs been many times that I asked Frontegg to deliver things for our clients. It has overall been a massive improvement. As a customer manager who has to go in and invite new users it’s been amazing.â Jessica, Director of Customer Success, Cleartrace
