Key Impacts
24x
Employee growth in 18 months without increasing IT headcount.
SOC 2
Compliance achieved.
80%
Reduction in help-desk tickets.
Metropolis Technologies is a computer vision and AI-based platform that transforms real-world interactions such as parking and fueling into seamless, ticketless experiences. With a global workforce of 23,000 employees, spanning across 15 different countries, the company is on a mission to remove the friction of physical transactions. To scale this ambitious mission, Metropolis strategically transitioned to JumpCloud to unify its global identity and device management. Todd Shipway, Senior Director of Technical Operations, spearheaded this shift to align the company’s IT infrastructure directly with its core engineering principles.
The Challenge: Inherited Complexity
As Metropolis expanded through rapid growth and strategic acquisitions, the IT team inherited a fragmented, complex infrastructure. This disjointed mix of legacy systems including tools from Microsoft, Google, and Okta created significant operational hurdles. For example, these disparate platforms forced employees to manage 10 to 15 different passwords, each carrying conflicting security requirements. Furthermore, manual onboarding processes placed an immense strain on the IT team and delayed employee productivity.
We were dealing with a fragmented mixture of platforms that created a very poor user experience and a highly involved onboarding process for our IT team.
—Todd Shipway, Senior Director of Technical Operations, Metropolis
The Solution: A Single Source of Truth
Driven by engineering principles, Metropolis sought a flexible solution that would allow the business to grow without being forced to adapt its processes to fit a rigid tool. They chose JumpCloud as their primary identity provider, consolidating device, identity and access management into a single “one-stop shop”. This strategy established JumpCloud as the organization’s single source of truth for all user identity and security protocols.
Metropolis implemented JumpCloud across nearly every feature, including Single Sign-On (SSO), password management, and device management. By leveraging JumpCloud’s robust API, the engineering team automated authentication for legacy tools that lacked native support for modern protocols like SAML or OIDC. Furthermore, the IT team extended secure access management far beyond traditional endpoints; they now centrally log and manage access for product-side field assets, including robots, drones, and edge-compute boxes stationed within parking garages.
The Results: Hyper-Growth and Compliance
By shifting to an “automation-first” identity strategy, Metropolis achieved transformative efficiency during a period of unprecedented expansion:
Unprecedented Scaling:
JumpCloud seamlessly supported the company’s explosive growth from 900 employees to 23,000 in just 18 months.
80% Ticket Reduction:
By implementing self-service password resets, the IT team eliminated the largest driver of help desk ticket volume.
Seamless Compliance:
The IT team integrated JumpCloud with internal auditing tools to successfully complete the company’s first SOC 2 audit, automating report generation with minimal manual involvement.
Lean Operations:
A strict focus on automation allowed Metropolis to maintain a highly lean IT organization despite managing a massive, global workforce.
Conclusion: Built for Engineers, by Engineers
For Metropolis, JumpCloud operates as more than just an IT tool; it serves as a strategic asset that empowers the company to move fast and maintain operational agility. Todd Shipway emphasizes that because engineers built the platform for other engineers, it delivers essential functionality without unnecessary complexity. Ultimately, this efficiency enables Metropolis to keep its IT operations lean while scaling at an extraordinary 24x rate.
JumpCloud is king in the IT world because it provides the necessary, high-performance tools we need without any of the fluff. It’s built by engineers, for engineers, and it works perfectly for both our IT operations and our global user base.
—Todd Shipway, Senior Director of Technical Operations, Metropolis