In this interview, we sit down with Abhishek Iyer, Director, Marketing and Growth at Descope, who brings over eight years of experience in the identity and security space. He shares Descope’s perspective on participating in the European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC), and collaborating with KuppingerCole on a webinar. Abhishek reflects on the value of these initiatives, the collaborative process, and offers insights for organizations navigating today’s identity challenges.
Could you briefly introduce yourself and your role at Descope?
My name is Abhishek Iyer and I lead marketing initiatives at Descope. My team is responsible for ensuring our target buyers are aware of Descope and the unique value it provides to solve their customer identity challenges. This involves initiatives such as creating a plethora of educational and developer content; being present in channels where our buyers reside like events, conferences, and newsletters; and engaging with industry analysts to get a pulse on the market as well as share our customer learnings.
For those who may not be familiar – what does Descope do, and what makes your approach to identity unique?
Descope is a drag & drop platform that helps organizations manage all their external identity journeys. Our no / low code solution helps organizations easily add authentication and authorization flows for their end users, business customers, partners, APIs, and AI agents.
Our approach to identity is unique because of Descope Flows, our visual workflow designer. Enabling organizations to design and modify their user journeys visually leads to faster time to value, easier modifications without touching application code, and a great deal of flexibility in adapting to complex enterprise architectures and disparate identity environments (e.g. federating authentication across web, mobile, and third-party partner portals).
What motivated Descope to participate in the European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC)?
The identity market poses a few challenges for marketing teams.
Firstly, the market is very fragmented. Decision-makers and influencers for workforce IAM, Privileged Access Management, customer IAM, and identity governance may all be different. The CIAM market has an additional challenge where the buying groups span across stakeholders: four different organizations may have an engineering leader, a product leader, an identity leader, and a security leader responsible for CIAM initiatives respectively.
Secondly, the market is very competitive. As a startup, Descope is competing with legacy incumbents that have been around for decades, other startups with different approaches to identity, open-source tools, and home-grown solutions built by organizations’ engineering and IT teams.
With this context, participating in the European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC) was an obvious decision for Descope. It helped lend visibility to our brand in the European market, provided a canvas for engaging and relevant discussions with prospects, and also opened the doors for deep conversations with channel partners and system integrators.
What were your key takeaways from the event?
We felt EIC was a highly relevant event with plenty of seasoned, technical identity leaders in attendance. The event also brought together plenty of people from across the identity community, including analysts, channel partners, and consultants—it was beneficial for us to engage with all these stakeholders and learn about localized and industry-specific trends in the identity space.
As for takeaways from our discussions and sessions at the event, we felt that every organization is interested in learning how IAM infrastructure can support the secure growth of AI applications and AI agents in a scoped and consented manner. AI holds huge promise, but applying proper authentication, authorization, and security guardrails are essential for its continued growth.
Did you collaborate with KuppingerCole before? How was your experience with us?
We have participated in EIC two years in a row (and will be back in 2026), the experience was fruitful and enjoyable both years so far. In early 2025, we also collaborated on a webinar with KuppingerCole covering CIAM trends and best practices for organizations to adapt to modern user expectations. We enjoyed collaborating with the analysts and client success managers for the webinar—the process was smooth from beginning to end, we had hundreds of relevant registrants and plenty of engaged questions on the webinar, and we would recommend these webinars to any organization looking to engage with identity and security leaders.
Looking ahead, what’s next for Descope – are there any trends or developments you're particularly excited about?
We’re excited about digital transformation and agentic AI. Many organizations going through digital transformation are placing a renewed emphasis on user experience: this includes signup, login, and MFA processes, exploring modern authentication methods like passkeys, and focusing on the mobile experience. As for agentic AI, it’s exciting to be observing and contributing to an interoperable, standards-based identity infrastructure (with protocols like MCP, which we provide authorization SDKs for) that can form the basis for the next waves of AI adoption without sacrificing security.
