Identity Resolution stitches together the many identifiers a customer leaves across touchpoints — browser cookies, mobile device IDs, authenticated email addresses, phone numbers, loyalty program IDs, payment tokens — into a unified, persistent customer profile. It is the foundational prerequisite for any activation that spans sessions, modalities, or devices.
Two architectural postures.
- Packaged (AEP): Identity resolution is a platform service. AEP maintains an ID graph with deterministic and probabilistic matching rules, updated in near real time. The customer configures matching policies; the platform handles the merge. Governance and match logic are vendor-owned.
- Composable (CDW-native): Identity resolution is built by the data engineering team in the cloud data warehouse, typically starting with deterministic rules (email → login mapping, device-to-account linking) and optionally enriched by specialist identity vendors (LiveRamp, Experian — not yet KG nodes). Governance is entirely customer-owned; match-rate outcomes depend directly on data engineering investment.
Why match rate matters. A system with 40 % identity resolution leaves 60 % of profiles anonymous. Audience sizes deflate, lookalike models train on incomplete data, and cost-per-acquisition metrics mislead because they denominate over improperly unified profiles. Architecture recommendations should elicit the organization's match-rate baseline and expectations before recommending a posture.
Key constraints on this capability.
- Cookie deprecation: Third-party cookie loss (especially post-Chrome changes) degrades web-channel match rates. Server-side identity bridging or first-party data strategies are required mitigations.
- Apple ATT: App Tracking Transparency limits advertising-ID access on iOS, degrading mobile-channel deterministic matching.
- GDPR right to erasure: Identity graphs containing EU residents must support profile deletion that propagates across all linked identifiers. The AEP posture handles this via platform tooling; the composable posture requires engineering the deletion pipeline.
Vendors providing this capability. vendor.adobe-experience-platform (packaged), vendor.snowflake + custom engineering (composable), vendor.databricks + custom engineering (composable).