Build vs Buy Entity Resolution:

A Comprehensive Guide

Organizations are drowning in a sea of information… and the tides are rising. Customer data, transactional records, and third-party data streams are often spread across multiple, disconnected systems. This data fragmentation leads to a host of problems, including:

• Inaccurate customer profiles: Without a unified view of your customers, you can’t personalize their experience or market to them effectively.
• Increased risk of fraud: Siloed data makes it difficult to detect fraudulent activity and protect your organization from financial losses.
• Poor decision-making: When you can’t trust your data, you can’t make informed decisions about your business.

Building entity resolution technology in-house involves significant financial commitment. From our research, we have found that organizations can expect to spend about $1 million to achieve 70% of the features of a state-of-the-art solution. Advancing to 80% capability can cost up to $5 million, while reaching 90% could escalate to $30 million or more – without ever achieving state-of-the-art performance.

As you can see, getting to a truly competitive level of accuracy is a multi-million dollar investment, and you still may not achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Advantages of Buying Entity Resolution 

Given the challenges of building an in-house solution, it’s no surprise that more and more organizations are choosing to buy a pre-built entity resolution solution. Here are just a few of the advantages of this approach:

• Faster Time-to-Value: With a pre-built solution, you can be up and running in a matter of weeks, not years. This means you can start realizing the benefits of entity resolution much sooner, without the lengthy and expensive development cycle.

• Superior Accuracy and Quality: Commercially available entity resolution solutions are built by teams of experts who have spent years perfecting their algorithms. This means you can be confident that you’re getting the most accurate and reliable results possible.

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership: While there is an upfront cost to buying a solution, the total cost of ownership is almost always lower than building in-house. When you factor in the cost of development, maintenance, and ongoing support, it’s clear that buying is the more cost-effective option.

• Focus on Your Core Business: By outsourcing your entity resolution needs, you can free up your in-house development resources to focus on projects that are core to your business. Let the experts handle the entity resolution, so you can focus on what you do best.

• Scalability and Flexibility for the Future: A good commercial ER solution will be able to scale to meet your needs as your data volumes grow. It will also be flexible enough to adapt to new data sources and new business requirements.

• Security and Privacy by Design: Leading entity resolution solutions are built with security and privacy in mind. This means you can be confident that your data is safe and that you are in compliance with all relevant regulations.

You can learn more by checking out our Entity Resolution Buyer’s Guide below:

There are many advantages to using the Senzing AI for Entity Resolution. We’re the acknowledged world-leader in entity resolution technology, with a long and proven history. Here are just three of the reasons you might want to consider using our Entity Resolution solution:

Depending on the scope and scale of your project, you can add Senzing entity resolution capabilities to your commercial software product in a few weeks. Even more complex entity resolution integration and deployment processes will only take a few months. Sound too good to be true? It’s not.

Just like many software vendors license third-party mobile communications, or payment processing capabilities – and easily add them to their commercial offerings – you can now add industrial strength entity resolution to your product or service. With the Senzing entity resolution for ISVs API, your customers will enjoy higher-quality results, you’ll gain an immediate competitive advantage, and your in-house development resources will be able to focus on other projects that further enhance your product’s core strengths.

Senzing entity resolution is the first purpose-built AI for real time entity resolution. It is highly accurate and scalable to billions of records, operates with low latency and sets itself apart from other solutions with its fast and easy integration of new data sources. Plus, with the Senzing SDK, all your data is safe and secure – you deploy all logic and data on premises or in your cloud environment, and no data flows to Senzing, Inc.

Our team has spent 350+ person years creating our uniquely advanced Entity Resolution. We estimate that an organization might spend about $1 million building technology that includes 70 percent of the key features and capabilities found in our state-of-the-art solution. Getting to 80% may bring the cost to $5 million. Reaching 90% is likely to cost around $30 million – and you still won’t be competitive.

It is much more cost effective to simply embed Senzing Entity Resolution into your offering with a few API calls. This choice will cost you less, can be implemented much more quickly, and will deliver results that are almost always higher quality than you’ll get building it yourself.

Utilizing the Senzing^® API will almost always deliver a more rapid return on investment and a lower TCO than building entity resolution capabilities yourself. It will also free up your in-house development resources to focus on more important projects, such as those that enhance your core strengths.

Schedule a time to meet with one of our entity resolution experts today. We’ll help you evaluate your specific requirements and determine if Senzing entity resolution is the best solution for your needs. If we don’t think we’re the best option for you, we’ll let you know that too.