6sense is a leading AI-powered B2B revenue intelligence platform that helps companies identify their ideal accounts and optimize go-to-market strategies. As the business scaled, 6sense began planning a modernization of its identity architecture to support long-term growth. 6sense needed an enterprise-grade authentication solution that could handle granular multi-tenancy, streamline SSO onboarding, and provide the flexibility their customers required—all without disrupting their existing workflows.
6sense is a revenue intelligence and marketing orchestration platform that helps enterprises identify prospects and predict when they’re ready to engage. Using artificial intelligence and a vast dataset, 6sense empowers companies to demystify buyer intent, personalize account-based marketing, and time their content delivery for maximum impact.
Bryan Wise, CIO at 6sense said:
“With such a diverse customer base spanning various industries and regulatory environments, we needed an authentication solution that could scale with security and flexibility at the forefront.”
Outgrowing homegrown identity
6sense had built a sophisticated identity system in-house to meet their early needs. However, as they continued to onboard enterprise customers, maintaining this homegrown solution became increasingly challenging and time-consuming. 6sense recognized an opportunity to evolve its identity platform to match the sophistication of its expanding enterprise ecosystem.
They began seeking an external vendor to support their momentum. As their top priority, 6sense desired a way to avoid compromising on capabilities or forcing their developers to rebuild their entire authentication architecture.
The detailed requirements for their ideal solution included:
Standards-based authentication: Support for the latest versions of SAML, OIDC, and OAuth protocols
SCIM provisioning: Automated group and user management
Granular multi-tenancy: Per-tenant custom attributes ready to configure out of the box
RBAC and ABAC support: Standard role-based access management with the option to add more granular, attribute-based access
Flexible role management: The ability to define different roles and permissions at the tenant level for different applications
Administrative access options: Some tenants needed 6sense admins to have console access, while others needed full self-service capabilities
Comprehensive audit logging: Compliance and security essentials needed for global customers facing diverse regulations
Bot protection: Tools to mitigate bot-based attacks and prevent automated account takeovers
High availability: Exceptional uptime with strong disaster recovery capabilities (RTO/RPO)
Excellent price-to-value ratio: Great performance and a solid toolkit for a reasonable budget
Beyond these non-negotiable technical requirements, 6sense recognized that single sign-on (SSO) onboarding, in which a customer would bring their own identity provider to log employees in, had become an area where automation could meaningfully enhance customer onboarding speed. The team saw potential for further efficiency through self-service enablement.
Bryan Wise, CIO at 6sense said:
“We didn’t take selecting a solution lightly. Our team conducted multiple evaluations of providers to assess each in detail. Ultimately, we wanted a vendor that could integrate existing workflows without causing customers (or our developers) noticeable disruption.“
Why 6sense chose Descope
Descope emerged as the clear choice because it offered the perfect combination of capabilities that 6sense needed: enterprise-grade security with the architectural flexibility to match their rigorous specifications. Descope met every requirement 6sense had laid out and more. Their team was especially impressed by the ability to toggle between JIT (Just-In-Time) provisioning and SCIM at the tenant level, allowing them to tailor the migration experience for different subscription tiers.
Bryan Wise, CIO at 6sense said:
“With Descope, we found a solution that could satisfy our requirement for sophisticated multi-tenancy with support for complex, per-tenant configurations. The ability to define different roles and permissions for each tenant, while delegating role creation to tenant admins, proved invaluable.”
One of Descope’s most compelling capabilities was the SSO Setup Suite. Previously, onboarding a customer with their own IdP for SSO was an engineering-intensive process requiring significant developer attention for each customer. With the Descope SSO Setup Suite, each customer implementation became a self-service workflow. Tenant administrators could now configure their own authentication settings, dramatically reducing both onboarding time and support overhead.
The Descope experience
6sense had an ambitious implementation schedule: set up by early October, with rigorous testing throughout, and go-live in November. This tight timeline required a platform that their engineers could work with independently, supported by responsive Descope assistance as needed. Regular Q&A sessions, combined with Descope’s robust documentation, enabled 6sense's developers to set up the new auth system largely by themselves.
Beyond comprehensive multi-tenancy and self-service SSO capabilities, Descope provided a full range of authentication tools and security features to support 6sense’s rapid growth:
Both modern and legacy authentication methods
Bot protection built directly into the platform
Comprehensive SDKs and APIs for seamless integration with other tools and solutions
Audit logging for compliance and security analysis
High availability and recovery resilience that meets demanding enterprise requirements
High-performing, flexible authentication at a budget-friendly price point
The 6sense team found Descope’s tools and processes to be intuitive and accessible, enabling them to maintain momentum on their tight timeline. The workflow-based approach through Descope Flows meant they could configure complex authentication paths without getting bogged down in low-level details.
Ultimately, Descope’s rapid time-to-production and flexibility enabled 6sense to deploy the new solution without adjusting existing auth processes. Because of this, 6sense saved a great deal of time that might have been spent onboarding and working from scratch. Instead, Descope conformed to the unique patterns of their in-house system while offering a considerable number of new options, scalability, and futureproofing.
Smart authentication supporting revenue intelligence
By transitioning from their homegrown solution to Descope, 6sense redirected development resources toward core product innovation. The revenue intelligence platform now has the new flexibility and capabilities that complement 6sense’s existing security model, like adaptive authentication, attribute-based access control (ABAC), and passwordless login methods.
Bryan Wise, CIO at 6sense said:
“Descope’s architecture allowed us to preserve our existing auth system’s logic, meaning our engineering team didn't need to rethink or completely redesign workflows. We could translate our homegrown system directly into Descope’s framework.”
Descope is a flexible drag & drop CIAM platform that helps organizations easily add authentication, authorization, and identity management to their apps, AI agents, and MCP servers. Customers use us for initiatives such as passwordless authentication, SSO, identity federation, strong MFA, fraud prevention, and agentic identity.
To get started with Descope, sign up for a Free Forever account. If you have questions about our platform, book time with our auth experts.
