Welcome to My World
By Robert Barker, Infoglide Software Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer
A recent post on the Netrics blog illustrates a key principle underlying the power and value of identity (“entity”) resolution software – solutions without it allow costly and even deadly decisions to be made. At Infoglide, we’re keenly aware of the sometimes life-or-death decisions that our solutions inform. The highest profile example is the core role our identity resolution technology plays in Secure Flight, the next generation airline passenger screening system that DHS/TSA will roll out in 2009.
In reflecting about 2008 in this last post of the year, it’s been great to see identity resolution (aka entity analytics or entity resolution) grow into a unique, identifiable market. We started developing identity resolution technology in 1996. IBM joined us several years ago after creating its Entity Analytic Solutions unit by acquisition. Seeing existing data matching vendors like Netrics beginning to position their products as identity resolution tools further validates the value of the space, and we welcome them all.
The following requirements represent the minimum capabilities needed to adequately address identity resolution problems that most often focus on identifying bad actors:
• Identity matching through an extensive library of attribute-specific analytics
• Relationship detection
• Relationship resolution
• Decisioning that leverages industry-standard and other rules-based systems
• Seamless integration with existing business processes via web services and APIs.
We’ve seen many failed attempts at solving identity resolution problems using non-optimal technologies, including creating custom in-house applications or trying to adapt products from adjacent and overlapping markets like data quality (DQ), master data management (MDM), customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence (BI). Each type is effective in solving problems in its space but each falls short when attacking identity resolution since none were designed to meet its unique requirements.
Agree? Disagree? We’d love to hear from you.
Happy Holidays from everyone at Identity Resolution Daily and Infoglide Software! We’ll resume posting on January 5.
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January 5th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Analysts “grok” IR as a key technology as well.
http://www.tcdii.com/mdmresearch/assumptions.html#identityresolution
Identity Resolution
During 2008, independent Data Quality vendors (AddressDoctor, G1, Human Inference, Trillium) will focus on name & address cleansing as they struggle against better funded match/merge & data profiling capabilities increasingly integrated with mega vendor MDM solutions; ongoing challenge will be aggregation of customer data balanced against privacy dictates
During 2008-09, MDM capabilities for classifying, discovering & archiving party data/relationships while maintaining privacy will become a major requirement; concurrently, users will be challenged to discern the price/performance/scalability & accuracy of matching algorithms; use of cross platform/cross brand customer keys will become core to enabling seamless loyalty programs & online services
By 2009-10, sophisticated hierarchy management capabilities will include “global IDs” as mainstay feature for all MDM vendors to link both legacy & newly-built hubs with Data Service Providers’ enrichment data; concurrently, support for metadata repositories to link mega vendors’ multitude of acquisitions will continue to significantly lag