Should You Build or Buy Entity Resolution?
Enterprises that want to add entity resolution to their applications or services often consider whether to build it or buy it. Watch this video with Senzing executive Will Layton as he discusses the challenges and costs of building entity resolution yourself and why it just doesn’t make sense to build it yourself anymore.
Some organizations have invested millions of dollars and years of effort into developing entity resolution, sometimes with teams exceeding 100 people. If you’ve attempted it, you know it’s not a trivial endeavor. Building entity resolution yourself is expensive, takes a long time, and is likely to produce inferior results compared to the best commercially available options.
By using the Senzing® entity resolution API, you’ll get a faster time to value, higher-quality results and a lower TCO than with any other entity resolution option. Plus, you can try the Senzing API for free today. Not ready to try Senzing yet? Read our Should Enterprises Build or Buy Entity Resolution blog for more details on build vs buy.
Edited Video Transcript
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction: Keep Building vs. Buying Senzing Entity Resolution
0:26 Getting to 80 or 90 Percent Accuracy is Expensive
0:43 Senzing Entity Resolution Expertise
1:01 Take the Senzing API for a Free Test Drive
1:21 Senzing Software is Cheaper than Building it Yourself
1:35 Maintaining Your Own System is Also Very Expensive
1:53 Senzing Entity Resolution Flexibility and Security
0:00 Introduction: Keep Building vs. Buying Senzing Entity Resolution
This is Will with Senzing. I’m often approached by people who are trying to figure out whether to build or buy entity resolution software. A lot of times they already have made a big investment. They have a lot of developers working on matching across some of their data, and over time they face a decision: do we keep investing in what we’re doing, or do we buy software from Senzing?
0:26 Getting to 80 or 90 Percent Accuracy is Expensive
Well, when you’re doing basic matching – doing a certain level of 50 or 60 percent accuracy – it doesn’t cost that much to build, or as much as it will cost as soon as you start trying to drive accuracy up. When you start getting to 80 or 90 percent accuracy, well, that’s going to cost a lot more money.
0:43 Senzing Entity Resolution Expertise
Senzing has a powerful engineering team that has been building entity resolution software for many years, with a lot of expertise around name matching, address matching, all the different attributes, whether it be people or company data.
1:01 Take the Senzing API for a Free Test Drive
So, going back to that build versus buy question…you’re going to see that the cost to move forward is expensive, but more importantly, give Senzing a try. Go and put data in our engine. Look at the results. Look at how easy it is to run in the cloud. See how it scales and is cost effective.
1:21 Senzing Software is Cheaper than Building it Yourself
Now, suddenly, you can see that Senzing is going to be cheaper for your business than if you try to continue to build it yourself, especially when you’re trying to get to a high level of accuracy, whether that be in the high 80s or 90-plus percent.
1:35 Maintaining Your Own System is Also Very Expensive
Senzing software is going to deliver nearly 100 percent accuracy, depending on the data, whereas your in-house systems are going to be expensive to get anywhere near that. And maintaining an in-house system is going to really be expensive, especially as you add more data into your solution.
1:53 Senzing Entity Resolution Flexibility and Security
With Senzing software, you can run in the cloud. That could be Google, Amazon or Microsoft. You can run it on-prem. You can run it air gapped. In all cases, you load the data you want to load into Senzing, and no data flows to us, yet we can run in any of those platforms, and we’ll scale in any of those platforms as well.