Identity Resolution Daily

[Post from Infoglide] And Then There Were Two

“IBM announced today that it plans to buy MDM vendor Initiate Systems.  As hypothesized here in this blog last week, the move was not entirely unexpected, but on the heels of last week’s announcement by Informatica to purchase Siperian, it certainly creates yet another wave in the marketplace.  More moves are certain to take place as competing companies align – and realign – their Single Entity View (SEV) strategies.  The key to this realignment will be for current industry players to maximize their functionality beyond ‘playing with matches’.  That dated view of fuzzy matching is no longer enough.  Not for the large data quality vendors.  Certainly not for the customer.”

Information Week: Global CIO: IBM Data Strategy Is Flawed, Say Kalido And Informatica

“Noting that Initiate’s product is spefically designed to handle only certain types of data—customer data and product data—Kalido CEO Hewitt says, ‘Where they have struggled is in mastering multiple domains, even though they advertise their products as such. The problem is that as you add domains, the complexity of the data relationships expands exponentially. So one domain might have 100 relationships, two domains 300 relationships, 10 domains 3,000 relationships. So when one master data element changes, hundreds of relationships could change, which requires a governance process to manage it.’”

Columbia Daily Tribune: Networks advance child-trafficking investigation

“Watson called up a contact at the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), a fusion center that combines intelligence from federal law enforcement and state and military sources. Watson also called a friend at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and asked him to prepare a ’serious incident report.’ ICE mobilized an officer specializing in human trafficking within minutes, Watson said.”

ITBusinessEdge: How Big Deals Affect MDM Competitors, Customers

“But the general upheaval in MDM aside, the IBM deal is interesting in another way. IBM has downplayed this as an MDM acquisition, positioning it more as buying into two verticals, health care and a government. Gartner’s Andrew White writes that at one point during the briefing, IBM was asked what the Initiate acquisition meant for MDM. IBM responded it reflects a ‘verticalization of MDM.’ White writes that’s good news for health care customers, but ‘troubling for IBM MDM product strategy.’”

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By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior Vice President

IBM announced today that it plans to buy MDM vendor Initiate Systems.  As hypothesized here in this blog last week, the move was not entirely unexpected, but on the heels of last week’s announcement by Informatica to purchase Siperian, it certainly creates yet another wave in the marketplace.  More moves are certain to take place as competing companies align – and realign – their Single Entity View (SEV) strategies.  The key to this realignment will be for current industry players to maximize their functionality beyond “playing with matches”.  That dated view of fuzzy matching is no longer enough.  Not for the large data quality vendors.  Certainly not for the customer.

The question of when companies like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft react – and how – will keep the blogosphere humming for awhile.

From the perspective of identity resolution – technologies that go well beyond simple matching - the IBM announcement creates a very interesting scenario.  Let’s be honest… there are three organizations have been truly positioned as leaders in providing SEV functionality that helps organizations expose fuzzy matches and non-obvious relationships across data sources.  IBM and Initiate are two;  Infoglide Software Corporation is the third.  IBM’s Identity Insight (formerly EAS), Initiate’s entity resolution, and Infoglide’s Identity Resolution Engine (IRE) all  deliver the promise of SEV or “who’s who… and who knows whom” technology, and all three answer considerably more than “yes it’s a match” or “no it’s not a match”.

In the case of Initiate Systems, the entity resolution product is new, and frankly came about as a basic repackaging of their successful MDM product for the Healthcare market.  IBM’s product, like Infoglide’s, was built from the ground up as an identity resolution engine by Jeff Jonas and the old SRD organization.  Now, with today’s announcement, IBM seems to have created some painful duplicity in their offerings.  It occurs to me that IBM has not become a global technology leader by mismanaging its products and messaging, so something’s gotta give!  Which product goes away, and when, will be interesting to see.

Either way, there are now effectively two players left standing in the SEV market – IBM and Infoglide.

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[Post from Infoglide] Gentlemen, Start Your Engines (and don’t play with those matches)

“Much is happening these days in the Data Quality space.  Customers are embracing MDM strategies at a record pace, M&A activity has picked up from an industry perspective, and the various players in the data quality marketplace are expanding their offerings like never before.  It matters little if the objective is to vet fraud or to master data. The race to deliver the dream of an enterprise-wide single-entity-view (SEV) is on.  Gentlemen (and Danica Patrick)… start your engines!”

legal blog: Top 10 Fraud Cases for 2009

“A New York man has been sentenced to serve four years in prison after failing to pay $1.6 million in workers’ compensation premiums. Chong-mun Chae, of South Korea, owned an asbestos removal company but falsely claimed that he had only one employee and that it was a secretary. He avoided being caught earlier by changing the name of his company several times.”

Software Insider: News Analysis: Siperian Acquisition Vaults Informatica Into An MDM Leadership Position

“The Bottom Line For Vendors - Acquisition of Siperian Hastens MDM Market Consolidation… Expect more acquisitions to occur as the market consolidates.  Potential acquirers include EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.” 

BioPrepWatch.com: Security stepped up at Super Bowl

“A separate Fusion Center will be run by the Miami-Dade Police Department to disseminate intelligence and other information to other South Florida police and government agencies. We collect intelligence from all over the world and then we disseminate it, so that everyone knows what’s going on,” William Maddalena, a Miami FBI official in charge of special events, told The Washington Post. “We’ll have daily briefings to put out the latest information we have.”

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By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior Vice President

Much is happening these days in the Data Quality space.  Customers are embracing MDM strategies at a record pace, M&A activity has picked up from an industry perspective, and the various players in the data quality marketplace are expanding their offerings like never before.  It matters little if the objective is to vet fraud or to master data. The race to deliver the dream of an enterprise-wide single-entity-view (SEV) is on.  Gentlemen (and Danica Patrick)… start your engines!

The key word here, naturally, is ‘engines’.  An engine moves things forward, and performs considerably more than one basic task.  As has been well-documented here at IdentityResolutionDaily, a true identity resolution engine plays a vital part of any SEV initiative.  Technologies that can look at data across disparate silos and return results that point to both matches AND non-obvious relationships are in high demand…  and set to grow even further in 2010.  The simplicity of “yes it’s a match” or “no, it’s not a match” is no longer sufficient for most organizations as they seek the single-entity-view.  Remember, an entity is not merely made up of attributes… but also relationships.  A true ‘engine’ points to those relationships, and moves the entire data quality initiative forward.

An engine cares little what the car looks like, and ought to drive a multitude of vehicles.  Similarly, an identity resolution engine ought to be built to solve a multitude of problems.  SEV for exposing risk and fraud, SEV for Healthcare Patient Matching, SEV for Law Enforcement, SEV for customer relationship management, SEV for data disambiguation, SEV for house-holding, and so on and so on.  The engine should perform the same functions… while only the domain (or body type) changes.

It also occurs to us that the engine ought to be flexible in terms of what is mounted to the chassis – and how.  Do you want the 2.2L engine?  4 cylinder or 6 cylinder?  In the case of an identity resolution engine, customers ought to be able to pick how the functionality is delivered.  Full enterprise software license with professional services to build the car?  Done.  Functionality on demand a la Infoglide Software’s Identity Resolution as a Service (IRaaS ^TM) offering?  You got it.  A SEV appliance that sits behind a customer’s firewall to alleviate privacy-in-data concerns?  No problem.

The need for an SEV engine that provides a powerful library of matching and relationship capabilities, delivered in a variety of customer-friendly methods is now more critical than ever.  With the increase in activity lately around the MDM space, one thing is clear:  the race is most definitely on.

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[Post from Infoglide] Master Data Movement

“I read with interest yesterday’s article at SeekingAlpha which discusses rumors swirling around the MDM software industry.  According to the article, sources suggest that two deals are very near completion.  The first of those rumored transactions would see Informatica picking up MDM provider Siperian.  On the heels of their acquisitions of Identity Systems and AddressDoctor, the Siperian purchase could not be totally unexpected – but would most certainly create some ripple effect worth watching.”

[Post from Infoglide] Connecting the Dots: We May Be Closer Than We Think

“Paul Rosenzweig, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, recently posted an intriguing piece on Harvard National Security Journal about connecting the dots regarding the Christmas Bomber. He makes a strong case that a decision to stop research on data analytic tools in 2003 has contributed to the problem analysts face today in making sense of the massive and manifold data sources they sift through.”

Forrester Blog: Introducing The MDM Market’s Newest 800lb Gorilla: Informatica Acquires Siperian!

“In the short term, I’m sure Informatica will be more than happy to continue to collect revenue from Oracle while keeping this partnership alive, but don’t expect future negotiated contracted terms to remain very reasonable as Informatica gains traction with its MDM strategy. No matter how often Oracle says how happy they are to maintain a friendly state of co-opetition with strategic partners, I don’t anticipate they will want to run the risk of a competitor pulling the rug out from under its aggressive MDM strategy.”

News8Austin: Community forum poses questions about Fusion Center

“According to department officials, sharing information with neighboring jurisdictions as well as state and federal agencies ensures that crime history and other information is shared outside the city limits. The department said it the center will be one that ‘analyzes information in order to best detect, respond and hopefully prevent criminal and terrorist activity — as well as other public safety hazards.’”

Ramon Chen: Informatica + Siperian Acquisition = Premier MDM Platform

“As expected, Informatica has announced that it has acquired Siperian (disclosure, my former company) for $130M… If predictions are correct, this will be a relative ‘bargain’ when compared with the upcoming IBM and Initiate Systems tie up which is expected to be 4 to 5x Initiate’s $90M annual revenues.”

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By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior Vice President

I read with interest yesterday’s article at SeekingAlpha which discusses rumors swirling around the MDM software industry.  According to the article, sources suggest that two deals are very near completion.  The first of those rumored transactions would see Informatica picking up MDM provider Siperian.  On the heels of their acquisitions of Identity Systems and AddressDoctor, the Siperian purchase could not be totally unexpected – but would most certainly create some ripple effect worth watching.

The first thing that springs to mind is what Oracle would intend to do with Informatica.  A long-time business partner of Oracle, strengthened through the 2008 purchase of Identity Systems, Informatica could now only be classified as a true and direct competitor to Oracle.  Can Oracle continue to OEM technology (SSA Name3, for example) from what would instantly become a major competitor?  Sleeping with the enemy is one thing… leaving money on the nightstand afterwards is another thing altogether!  It will be interesting to see what happens here, to say the least.

The other rumored acquisition is that of Initiate Systems by IBM.  Thought to be roughly twice the size of Siperian, Initiate would tend to give further credibility to IBM’s vast – and growing – presence in the Health Care industry, where Initiate has become a recognized industry leader.  What muddies the waters, however, would be the question of what IBM would intend to do with Initiate’s entity resolution engine.  In a nutshell, Initiate has been one of two software vendors doing an excellent job of providing technologies applicable for both MDM and fraud/risk related implementations.  Infoglide Software Corporation is the other.

Marketed in an eerily similar fashion to Infoglide’s earlier-released Identity Resolution Engine (is imitation the most sincere form of flattery?), Initiate’s offering in this identity resolution space could become short-lived given IBM’s large and ongoing investment in InfoSphere Identity Insight Solutions (formerly Entity Analytics Solutions).  How soon that would happen, of course, is anyone’s guess.

One thing is certain, however: the need for technology that is applicable to both MDM initiatives and that exposes risk and fraud through matching and linking of entities is very real and growing.  How the other major industry players react – should either or both of these rumors become reality – will define the industry for years to come.

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

Paul Rosenzweig, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, recently posted an intriguing piece on Harvard National Security Journal about connecting the dots regarding the Christmas Bomber. He makes a strong case that a decision to stop research on data analytic tools in 2003 has contributed to the problem analysts face today in making sense of the massive and manifold data sources they sift through.

Initiating more research would clearly add to the tools that analysts have at their disposal. At the same time, applying existing entity resolution software technology to more data sources could add significant firepower and help address the data challenge.

Let’s examine four issues Mr. Rosenzweig raised and evaluate the current state of entity resolution technology to address each issue:

1.  Scalability

“This is a veritable flood of data.  In hindsight, of course, it is very easy to see the pieces that connect together to form a picture of Abdulmutallab’s plot.  But those 10 or so bits of information were floating in an ocean of other data—literally millions of different individual entries from thousands of different sources in a host of different databases.”

Existing entity resolution technology scales to handle multiple tens of millions of transactions daily. While the “flood of data” would likely test the limits of existing systems, it’s not clear that reaching the required scalability is limited by the software or is simply a function of establishing well-founded rules and incorporating the needed amount of hardware capacity.

2.    Real-Time Analysis

“We continue to rely on the intuition of analysts to provide the insight we need.  It is all well and good to say ‘with the NSA intercept about a Nigerian we should have started looking at all Nigerians’ or ‘we should have begun looking at everyone named Umar Farouk,’ but those leaps of insight and anticipation are not routine—they require analysis and consideration.  And that requires time—time to ponder the necessity of making precisely that inquiry. But time is what our analysts don’t have.  At least not enough of it.  Not with the flood of data we are seeing.  They have to prioritize and move certain lines of inquiry to the top of the pile.”

Crucial attributes of entity resolution technology are its ability to (a) process massive amounts of data in real time and (b) make automated decisions that prioritize the importance of each element. Entity resolution will never displace trained analysts, but its ability to sift through millions of pieces of data to produce a prioritized list of the most important potential connections offers the best way to fully exploit analysts’ brainpower and accelerate the process of detecting impending terrorism.

3.    Automated Scoring

“What we lack is not human intuition.  Rather we lack the tools to make human intuition effective and automated.  The head of the NCTC told a rather shocked Senate committee the other day that, in effect, NCTC analysts don’t have a “Google‐like” tool for database inquiries.  They can’t, for example, simply type in ‘Umar Farouk’ and pull up all the pages with links to that name.”

While a “Google-like” tool isn’t currently being used, the components needed to build one are available. By connecting to the appropriate data sources, some of the more powerful entity analytic software can “similarity search” a name across multiple disparate (and even remote) databases, and the software will detect similar attributes of multiple identities, and then combine them to yield a broad picture of an individual’s activities as documented in the data sources.

4.    Multiple Attributes

“But even that wouldn’t be enough—because there would likely still be far too many ‘Umar Farouk’ pages for any analyst to review (especially if instead the name we had was, for example, ‘Omar Abdul’).  What is necessary, as the Markle Foundation has said persistently, is for us to authorize and invest in tools that allow for automated analytics—things like tagged data (so that corrections to information are automatically transmitted for updates), identity resolution techniques (so that ‘Umar’ and ‘Omar’ are both considered), and persistent queries (so that a question that an analyst asked last month about Umar Farouk persists in the databases and is automatically linked to a father’s warning about his son Umar when that comes in three weeks later).”

One untouched topic is the effect of associating other attributes with an identity in addition to names, e.g. phone, SSN, passport, license plate, eye color, DOB). Matching similar names in the absence of other information may not be adequate to raise an alert about an identity, but when other attributes are captured and added, the problem becomes markedly more manageable. “Persisting” an identity is a good suggestion that enables more attributes to be added over time. Growing the data in this fashion will enable the system to trigger when a connection to someone on a watch list is identified.

Entity resolution technology is already sufficient to make an enormous difference today if it were just more broadly applied. While Mr. Rosenzweig is correct in his assertion that more research on data analytics tools is needed and can help move the process forward, we should also move rapidly to leverage available technology: entity resolution.

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By the Infoglide Team

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Create Table Homo_Sapiens

“Identity Resolution is about the same but  – if a distinction is considered to exist – uses a wider range of data, rules and functionality to relate collected data rows to real world entities. In my eyes exploiting external reference data will add considerable efficiency in the years to come within deduplication / identity resolution.”

OmniMD: Clock starts ticking on meaningful use comments

“The clock starts ticking today on a two-month window in which the public can comment on the Health & Human Service Department’s “meaningful use” proposal, a set of rules outlining how providers can qualify for incentives for using electronic health records.”

Beyond Search: Startling Fact: Size of Cloud Computing Market

“The global cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 28 percent from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012, according to IBM based on various market estimates.’

National Underwriter: Fraud Increases In ’09; Bureau Budgets Tighten 

“The Coalition interviewed 37 fraud bureaus during the first three weeks of Oct. 2009 for its survey, titled ‘The Economy and Fraud Fighting on the State Level.’ The bureau directors were asked for their views on trends in 15 areas of fraud, which include staged auto accidents, auto give-ups, padding auto and homeowner claims, arson, and workers’ compensation fraud by both workers and employers.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Healthcare Identity Resolution Confusion

“Confusion about medical records can lead to chaos. We’ve all heard horror stories about hospital tragedies caused by misidentification of a patient, such as applying an unnecessary surgery. It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of correct, unambiguous information in the practice of medicine. Knowing as much as possible about a patient enables a practitioner to reach a correct diagnosis and the proper treatment regimen in the least amount of time.”

NewsandSentinel.com: Local officials do their part to fight terrorism

“Tom Campbell, a consultant on terrorist issues who has worked with Sandy in the past, has been in the field of counter-terrorism for 14 years. We do not profile based on ethnicity and race, what we do is profile behavior,” said Campbell. “Terrorism is evolutionary. Terrorists are always changing their behavior, appearances and tactics. What we try to do to prevent terrorism is focus on the behavior. That’s how we disrupt it before it happens. The emphasis is on prevention.”

intelligent enterprise: Predicting BI Highlights for 2010

“Cloud computing and SaaS will become less niche as both BI heavy weights and vertically-focused vendors recognize that the infrastructure side of BI offers little competitive advantage; instead, it’s the time-to-value and agility. IT owners who don’t want to give up any control are in for a bruising.”

ISRIA: Testimony of Secretary Napolitano before the Senate Committee on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “Intelligence Reform: The Lessons and Implications of the Christmas Day Attack”

“DHS uses TSDB data, managed by the Terrorist Screening Center that is administered by the FBI, to determine who may board, who requires further screening and investigation, who should not be admitted, or who should be referred to appropriate law enforcement personnel. Specifically, to help make these determinations, DHS uses the No-Fly List and the Selectee List, two important subsets within the TSDB. Individuals on the No-Fly List should not receive a boarding pass for a flight to, from, over, or within the United States.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

Confusion about medical records can lead to chaos. We’ve all heard horror stories about hospital tragedies caused by misidentification of a patient, such as applying an unnecessary surgery. It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of correct, unambiguous information in the practice of medicine. Knowing as much as possible about a patient enables a practitioner to reach a correct diagnosis and the proper treatment regimen in the least amount of time.

Underscoring the importance that accurate information plays in effective treatment, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed in 2009 includes incentives for hospitals and doctors to adopt and support certified electronic health record (EHR) technology. In fact, the Act set aside $20 billion to encourage health care organizations to improve their recordkeeping through healthcare information technology.

Today’s hot healthcare industry topic, therefore, is electronic health records. While an EHR can create the potential for interoperability, it can’t deliver interoperability without robust identity resolution. High-quality health care depends on complete, unambiguous patient information being available at all times, so identity resolution technology has become a crucial component of a well-designed healthcare identification infrastructure.

By applying identity resolution to patient identification integrity, identity resolution can prevent common medical errors:
Duplicates are a simple example, where the two records exist for the same person within a single facility. More complex types of errors can easily start to mount up, including overlaps where more than one record exists for one person within two facilities within a single organization, and overlays where information for two people are integrated under a single record.

The rush to respond to ARRA resulted in overstatements of the identity resolution capabilities of many products. For example, most master data management (MDM) systems include matching and de-duplication capabilities that have become labeled “identity resolution” while in fact they lack the critical requirements for identity resolution. Dan Power of Hub Solution Designs has pointed out the growing role of identity resolution in MDM and the need for MDM vendors to move beyond “not invented here” thinking to incorporate true identity resolution into their offerings.

Confusion about medical records can lead to chaos. Clearing up confusion about identity resolution clears a path out of the chaos that will lead to better solutions.

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