Identity Resolution: Taking Off in 2009?
By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer
On February 2nd, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about IBM’s application of its identity resolution technology in government organizations, noting they expect it to generate $1 billion in the next four years. Just 18 months ago, Gartner initially identified entity resolution and analysis (aka identity resolution) as a technology “on the rise” in its analysis of the business intelligence (BI) market. A year later in July 2008, it had moved from the bottom to near the top of the curve. Moving into 2009, identity resolution is emerging as an independent horizontal market with multiple vertical applications, despite a challenging economy.
As with any emerging horizontal technology, the requirements for identity resolution solutions derive from needs articulated by early adopter organizations in a variety of vertical markets. Using identity resolution technology, these early adopters are developing and implementing vertical solutions for many fraud applications, including identifying employers who deceive workers compensation agencies, catching retailers who swindle winning lottery tickets, and detecting retail returns fraud and organized retail crime. Of course, the mother of all identity resolution projects is assessing terrorist risk of airline passengers before they board. On the surface these applications may seem unrelated, but they are driven by two significant common concerns – understanding more clearly who they are dealing with and discovering hidden, non-obvious relationships.
Until recently the identity resolution space was often overlooked, sometimes addressed by custom in-house applications, or inadequately served by cobbling together from products in adjacent and overlapping markets, such as data quality (DQ), master data management (MDM), customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence (BI), with existing systems and data sources.
As vendors from these adjacent markets tried to address the needs with existing products, customers found that they lack the combination of integrated capabilities needed to adequately build identity resolution solutions. Here’s a chart that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each adjacent market’s approach to identity resolution.
From all indications, we expect continued acceleration of interest in solutions based on identity resolution technologies during 2009. We’d like to hear your thoughts.
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