IBM Acquires ID Resolution Capabilities

IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) has acquired SRD (Las Vegas), an analytics firm that makes identity resolution software. The software uses a combination of public records and proprietary techniques to verify customers' personal data, create a normalized view of a firm's customers and ensure that the data is stored in a format amenable to rapid and accurate searching.

John Slitz, formerly CEO of SRD, is now VP of entity resolution solutions at IBM. His first task is to help determine how identity resolution can have the greatest impact when combined with other technologies across IBM's technology portfolio and partner network. Then, Slitz plans to introduce the resulting innovations into the marketplace with the help of business consultants within IBM Global Services.

For the banking industry, the technology of identity resolution can help with CRM and marketing, as well as anti-money laundering and privacy protection. "Our ability to do on-demand entity resolution results in orders-of-magnitude cleaner data about personal information, the ability to relate people together and the ability to protect privacy in unique ways," remarks Slitz.

SRD software can tap data sources from IBM rivals Oracle and Microsoft, in addition to IBM's database technology. The software is compatible with both the SQL and J2EE development platforms.

This article includes reporting from Business Intelligence Pipeline.