When you’re managing a 92% customer satisfaction rate with your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) on-premise software, friction and performance issues can cost customers  — especially when you focus on small- and mid-sized businesses with little room for error.

While abas AG’s European customers remained satisfied with on-premise solutions, in the United states, abas USA had started seeing more core industries shifting to the cloud. They needed to do the same if they expected to maintain that customer satisfaction — and continue expanding their numbers.

“In the U.S., people don’t want to hear from you if you don’t have Single Sign On (SSO) and aren’t in the cloud,” says Nicolas Dormont, Vice President of Information Systems, abas USA and Corporate Product Manager, abas AG. Since abas already had a very intuitive ERP solution, a key focus of migrating to the cloud would be creating an equally intuitive way to handle identity management.

Build vs. Buy

Using OAuth 2.0, abas began working through the complex problem of securely managing the interaction of thousands of customers with real-time expectations as part of their research into an identity access management (IAM) solution.

But fully executing on their vision would mean pulling developers from their core mission of product expansion and dedicating a team to regular maintenance and upgrades. Choosing to build in-house would also render hitting their go-to-market deadlines a challenge.

“In today’s world, with cloud computing services and microservices, integrating with other packages which specialize in a specific industry is usually a lot more cost- and time-efficient than just doing it all by yourself,” Dormont says.

They quickly realized that a fully-featured, out-of-the-box solution would be more efficient than pursuing the challenge in-house. “Why reinvent the wheel when you can partner with an IDaaS provider trusted by more than 500 enterprise companies and thousands of others?” Dormont says.

A potential third-party partner would need to offer a multi-tenant authentication that could handle federation and user management. In addition to enterprise connections like Active Directory (AD), their preferred out-of-the-box solution would also offer multifactor authentication (MFA) and web tasks, as well as the extensibility to scale with abas road map.

Modern Approach to Applications Drives ROI

Dormont’s evaluation revealed several options, but ultimately, abas opted for Auth0. “We went with number one for the architecture, why not go with the number one for Identity as a Service (IDaaS)?” he says.

Being able to off-load abas’s security and scalability needs to Auth0 saved both time and money. “Auth0 provides an end-to-end product in terms of ID and service — everything all the way from user provisioning to having dashboards and APIs.” This modern approach to building applications through the integration of microservices or full-fledged services like Auth0 ensured a significant return on investment (ROI) for abas. Based on these savings, abas saw an 1,100% ROI with Auth0 during launch year, with a continued offset for maintenance, upgrades, and security.

But most importantly, offloading identity to a trusted and well-established service allowed abas to focus on their core mission while maintaining their go-to-market timeline. “We would have had to probably delay the projects at least six months to get to a point where we are with Auth0. To implement Auth0, we are talking days, not even weeks,” Dormont says.