Welcome to our blog series on decoding identity resolution. This is a nine part blog that offers an attempt at a friendly, comprehensive view of how to think about the concept of identity resolution as well as how to interpret the way it is represented in marketing and sales materials by different companies across the tech landscape. The other articles in the series can be found here:
Part Nine: Conclusions
Why is this so complex?
Great question.
The short answer is that most companies aren’t software companies. If you are a hotel chain, you specialize in managing hotels and guest experiences. If you are a retail company you specialize in creating and selling a collection of products. At some point, the world shifted to being online and it has forced every single company to start investing in software development, but that’s not their core business.
The fact is that no company has the capability to be all things. Our belief at Amperity is that not every company has to be a software company: You should be able to compete in the modern world without having to morph into a completely different company.
Building software requires a well-crafted selection of tools, code, applications, services, etc. and large enterprise companies often have a lot of “silos.” The systems they’ve adopted were due to necessity, not due to an advanced architecture plan. Building from scratch is expensive.
Companies that didn’t begin as software companies have slowly augmented their business with technology meant to serve the organization, but unfortunately, it still needs to be configured by a technical team. In an organization that complex, it’s prohibitive to have expertise in the product and business priorities on the one hand but also technical priorities and deep technical understanding on the other.
A massive wellspring of software companies has emerged to help everyone compete, but differentiating them is complex and the result is a vast landscape of applications with various strengths, complexities, and use cases, all vying for space and attention.
You can embrace the complexity without having to solve it yourself
Identity resolution is integral to any data management strategy. Unfortunately, it’s also a very complex problem to tackle, which is why most vendors try to avoid it. They presume you will solve it with another platform or develop expensive internal solutions before integrating with their application.
Software companies use that complexity to create marketing stories that distract companies and encourage them to accept over-simplified answers that ignore deeper functional problems.
Any company that genuinely has strong identity resolution should be eager to spend time with your technical teams walking them through exactly how it works. I know we would be excited to walk you through ours.
Hopefully, this series has helped cut through some of the noise in the space regarding identity resolution. If you have any questions please feel free to contact caleb@amperity.com. Thanks for reading!