i6 provides fuel management software for the aviation industry: airports, airlines, and fuel suppliers. Its platform ensures efficient and accurate fueling for big-name customers like Virgin Atlantic, ExxonMobil, and Boston Logan International Airport.

In the coming years, COO Alex Mattos anticipates rapid growth across the U.S., the Middle East, and Europe. Says Mattos, “We're at 150 airports now, we want to be in 1,000.” But that's only part of the growth plan. i6 also wants to move up the supply chain to the logistics of fuel, connecting data the whole way. “Our standard problem,” according to Mattos, “is that we never have enough resources to do all the features we want to do.”

Mattos and i6 are ambitious: “We'd like to be opening 5 to 10 airport locations a week.” But each new location requires a new site with a new authentication stack, which threatened to slow down expansion.

i6 Encounters Turbulence as it Expands

i6 struggled with its internal authentication technologies as it expanded, which could have led to lost business. Mattos highlights an example: British Airways. “British Airways has 4,000 pilots. And we don't want to be managing 4,000 pilots in our own database.” European data regulations, like GDPR, threatened to make this even more difficult. 

i6’s customers have different regulatory needs, different integration needs, and different internal security needs. And when each client requires something unique, configuration can take months. That extra time leads to impatient customers and, often, less secure solutions. i6 needed a partner that could scale with them.

Before Auth0, Mattos faced the prospect of having to “build, effectively, Auth0” by integrating identity providers like Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) and Okta. “We'd build the first [configuration] for ADFS, and that would work well. And then the next one would come along and it would be Okta, and it would then be, 'Oh, we better build that one then.' And then it would be build the next one, build the next one."

Each client is different, and each would have required its own configuration. Even if i6 built the underlying authentication service, Mattos said, configuration “would take many weeks.”

“It wasn't going to scale effectively and it didn't meet our customer needs,” says Mattos.

Auth0’s SSO Allowed i6 to Scale Securely

The data i6 manages is sensitive. “It's fueling information and you could work out who gets a competitive advantage if you captured all of my fuel loads and things like that,” Mattos says.

As such, security became a focus. Customers wanted to control their own passwords and meet their own internal security policies. “Single Sign On (SSO) just made a lot of sense,” Mattos said. “And that was the biggest buy-in, to be honest, around the security side of it.”

The first use case? i6 itself. “There were some bad examples of password discipline, shall we say, on our first servers,” said Mattos. An ISO 27000 audit revealed i6 wasn’t managing their usernames and passwords well.

From an internal rollout to hundreds of external use cases, i6’s kept expanding their relationship with Auth0. Seventy-five to eighty percent of the interactions with the i6 platform are through its web interface, and the other 25% are from system-to-system integrations among airports, airlines, and fuel support companies. All needed secure authentication.

“The last customer we onboarded that required SSO,” says Mattos, “took a couple of days to get configured and was signed off for inside a week.”

Configuring in Days, Instead of Weeks

Switching to Auth0 has saved i6 significant resources. “We have done the estimates internally as part of the business case for Auth0 versus building ourselves. It's gigantic — it's not even worth talking about, frankly.” Mattos estimates that the solution achieved enormous savings for i6, yet delivering a seamless experience for our customers who require SSO.

In an environment where “nearly every new customer” demands SSO, being able to set it up in just two days is a big advantage. Mattos is focused: “Our aim is to scale fast [...] Two days to get SSO set up is fantastic, that's exactly what we need.”

Robust authentication means saving money, saving time, and, most importantly, winning business. When customers make authentication a requirement of a contract, i6 can say, according to Mattos, “‘Yes, no problem,' rather than saying, 'We think so. Come back to you in six months.' That's absolutely helped us win more business."