Held Hostage by Entity Resolution
By Jeff Jonas, published March 25, 2020

The number of organizations still operating hard-coded and expensive homegrown entity resolution is incredible. A new urgency to cut expenses make these homegrown systems a prime target for fast “cost takeout.” [Note: Our software runs entirely on your cloud or on-premise computers. No personal data flows to Senzing, Inc.]

When deploying Senzing real-time AI for entity resolution, an organization’s return on investment (ROI) is usually measured in months, if not weeks. In addition, they can free up many of their most valuable software engineers and data scientists to work on more critical projects, such as revenue generation. It makes no sense anymore for top technical talent to spend their time customizing entity resolution when commoditized technology, like Senzing, is readily available.

How much do homegrown entity resolution systems really cost?

When calculating the total annual cost of in-house systems an organization should consider:

  • Total Annual Full-time Equivalent (FTE) Costs — technical resources required to maintain and enhance custom code, train and tune algorithms, manage day-to-day operations, and perform periodic maintenance, such as full reloads, end-user support, mapping and cleaning new data sources, and retraining and re-tuning algorithms when new data sources are added.
  • Total Annual Third-Party Licensing Costs — third-party software used by the existing homegrown system, which may include expensive commercial databases, licensed address hygiene libraries, name standardization and comparison libraries, and other analytics products such as extract, transform and load (ETL) tools.
  • Total Annual Hardware Costs — batch-based entity resolution systems often require two hardware systems, one to service 7×24 business transactions and another to reload all of the data in the background. The extra overhead of the second system includes hardware, operating system, licensed software (e.g., database, security software, backup software), storage, networking equipment, backup, maintenance contract, security operations, and power and cooling.

Senzing Deployments Deliver Rapid ROI

When replacing a homegrown entity resolution system, Senzing can deliver a hard dollar ROI in under nine months, and in some cases less than three months. This is possible because we eliminate many of the costs of homegrown systems.

First-year costs of a typical Senzing project include:

  • Affordable subscription pricing for end users is based on record volumes (pricing here). Distribution and OEM pricing is also available
  • Unlimited remotely-delivered technical support
  • One hardware system; two systems are not required because Senzing updates the data automatically in real time and there is no need for batch updating or reloading (hardware sizing here)
  • Fast low-risk integration using open source accelerators; cost varies but, for a system with three average data sources and one real-time interface, an integration could be completed in about 2.5 months by three people, or .65 of an annual FTE
  • No training or tuning of entity resolution algorithms required i.e., no cost
  • Rapid onboarding of new data sources without experts; cost varies but, per data source, averages one week to map and load historical data and one week to operationalize real-time net changes
  • Negligible labor costs to manage day-to-day operations

Other potential immediate gains from Senzing:

  • Downstream cost savings enabled by better data quality e.g., fewer fraud analysts needed due to lower false positives rates, faster customer service talk times and higher satisfaction because of better 360-degree views, and more efficient marketing from fewer duplicates
  • Risk reduction e.g., decreased analyst fatigue because of lower false positive rates, discovery of suspect transactions or people in real time, and fewer bad decisions caused by old data

Additional cost benefits to keep in mind:

  • Consolidation and “cost takeout” of other entity resolution technologies
  • Revenue growth from rapid delivery of new products and services, especially those leveraging real-time decision making and more advanced analytics
  • Business operations improvements e.g., detecting more duplicates during customer onboarding, identifying more fraud and insider threat risks, performing more effective and time efficient investigations, delivering better customer service, and simplifying compliance processes (GDPR, CCPA, etc.)
  • Redirection of valuable engineering resources from entity resolution tasks to more important work e.g., developing better models for revenue generation or fraud detection

Quantifying Senzing ROI

Senzing can help organizations quickly estimate ROI, create an overall enterprise architecture and develop a detailed project plan. For more information, contact us.

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