The Informatica Corporation software was born in 1986 out of the experience gained by its original architects in building bespoke name matching systems, mostly for government agencies.

This experience had shown that, while the significance of name matching in different systems varied considerably, there had always been the same basic set of concerns:

Some of the projects undertaken emphasized the need to quickly achieve a match, if there was one. Others placed their emphasis on proving that there was no match at all.

One project presented the unusual opportunity for empirically developing and modifying an algorithm designed to solve phonetic, orthographic and Anglicization problems in more than 2,000,000 hand written credit records.

During the project development activity some 300,000 computerized matches were compared to manually made matches done by expert searchers. Whenever the searcher found data not found by the system, the algorithm was revised.

Another project involved the re-processing of 25 million records where it was known that at least 99% of the records were in fact pairs of records about the same person. This project also included the need to develop a name search system to handle over 30,000 inserts per day.

This project demanded a performance breakthrough as the design objective was to support a 50,000,000 record on-line database. The successful solution, based on the fact that the project’s purpose was to identify the records that were not in pairs, and that this population was smaller than the error rate in the data, required considerable research.

One of the characteristics of SSA-NAME3 is that it is an empirical rather than theoretical solution to the aforementioned problems.

The original company set up to develop and market this technology was known as Search Software America (SSA), giving meaning to the "SSA" in SSA-NAME3. The Search Software America name existed until 2005 when the company name was changed to Identity Systems. In May 2008 Informatica Corporation acquired Identity Systems. Even after the company name changes, the SSA-NAME3 product name was retained because of its brand awareness and usage in hundreds of production systems worldwide.

The early releases of the SSA-NAME3 Algorithms were known as SSA-NAME1. These were superseded by SSA-NAME2 and the latest generation was called SSA-NAME3. At this point, the underlying algorithm design stabilized and the product name stayed as SSA-NAME3.

Since inception, our mission has been to help organizations design optimum dialogues for their specific needs, and overcome the complexities and variation in their data. The experience gained from these diverse projects and those of our customers around the world is incorporated into the ongoing development and maintenance of SSA-NAME3.

In the late 1990’s SSA-NAME3 also became the core-technology inside our two newer products, the Data Clustering Engine (DCE) and the Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR). While SSA-NAME3 continues to be sold and supported as a software development kit, it is now more commonly distributed as the core component of these newer solution based products.

Continuing research & development into the core SSA-NAME3 key-building algorithms, search strategies, match processes and multi-country support continues apace, (a) because of the large installed SSA-NAME3 user base and (b) because the IIR and DCE products are highly dependent on the quality, reliability and selectivity generated by SSA-NAME3.