Knowledgent, the data and analytics firm, and Tamr, the data unification solution provider, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver scalable big data unification and analytics solutions to client organizations in life sciences, financial services and other industries. As part of this partnership, the two companies will collaborate on big data analytics solutions that leverage Tamr’s scalable platform for data curation and unification, including its new Tamr for CDISC solution, announced today at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose, Calif.
Knowledgent enables organizations to gain critical business insights from their information by combining data and analytics with industry domain expertise. Knowledgent has observed that clients struggle with the ability to connect and curate structured and unstructured data across a wide range of sources and silos, resulting in costs and delays as often manual solutions are implemented.
Tamr overcomes the traditional problems of manual data curation. It allows for continuous, cost-effective, and timely cataloging, connection and curation of data from a large number of internal or external sources with a lot of data variety. Tamr’s machine learning algorithms, guided by humans, enable organizations to maximize the effectiveness and productivity of their data assets, such as clinical trial data and financial data sets.
“Knowledgent’s data and analytics practice has been enabling clients to gain significant business insights by leveraging structured and unstructured data, internal and external to an organization,” said Tom Johnstone, Managing Partner for Life Sciences, Knowledgent. “Tamr’s platform and industry-focused solutions, such as its solution for scalable, automated CDISC data conversion, are the perfect accelerators for life sciences business and IT stakeholders who are trying to harness the power of machine learning for data curation.”
“Knowledgent is a natural partner for us,” said Andy Palmer, co-founder and CEO of Tamr. Inc. “For example, we can provide life sciences customers with a scalable, replicable way to convert siloed data to the CDISC data standard to meet data-interchange requirements for IND/NDA programs. This is a process that’s been ridiculously expensive, time-consuming and hard to automate in the past. We’re looking forward to working with Knowledgent to break down these and other business barriers for our mutual customers.”
Tamr and Knowledgent plan to deliver solutions for other use cases in life sciences and financial services that require siloed data to be converted to a standard format. An example in financial services is the BCBS 239 principles for effective risk data aggregation and risk reporting in financial services.
Tamr announces two packaged data-unification solutions for business analysts
Tamr, Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., today announced two data-unification solutions for specific, high-value data variety challenges: Tamr for CDISC and Tamr for Procurement. Using the solutions, business analysts can unify data across enterprise silos ─ minimizing the amount of effort by data scientists to create specific measurable value. The solutions are being introduced and demonstrated at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose, Calif. (Booth #531).
Tamr solutions are designed to help weed through and organize enterprise data to get the most impactful data and analysis into the hands of decision-makers.
Tamr for CDISC provides a simple, scalable way to automatically convert, validate, and package clinical study data according to the latest CDISC standards. Today, organizing CDISC data submission is expensive, time-consuming and difficult to automate. Companies typically spend millions of dollars annually on specialty contractors, who manually convert the data from the proprietary-system files in which it’s stored. Tamr understands the systems’ input and output formats and controlled terminologies, and automatically converts clinical datasets using the proper definition files. Future transformations become easier as Tamr learns, enabling businesses to build in-house conversion and integration expertise.
“Pharma companies have been stuck on a treadmill, paying teams of contractors over and over again to prepare trial data for regulatory submissions,” said John Keilty, general manager at Third Rock Ventures and former VP of information technology and informatics at Infinity Pharmaceuticals. “This is not only expensive and time-consuming, it’s also error-prone ─ and thus very risky. Tamr’s approach replaces outdated methods of data unification and CDISC conversion with an automated, repeatable process that gets more accurate the more it’s used. Tamr could also remove barriers to early clinical data mapping, providing an opportunity for more robust data analysis.”
Tamr for Procurement enables a comprehensive analysis of procurement opportunities that leverages data across all enterprise systems. Today, procurement data is spread across siloed ERP and supply chain systems, making it hard to do a comprehensive analysis of savings opportunities. Tamr provides a simplified, unified view of supplier, part and site transaction data across the enterprise. It achieves this by (1) referencing each transaction and record across many data sources, (2) building correct supplier names, addresses, ID’s, etc. for a variety of analytics, and (3) cataloging an organized inventory of sources, entities and attributes. Customers can now find all sourcing opportunities, including “long-tail” opportunities that can often add up to 75% or more of total savings.
Patent-pending technology using machine learning algorithms performs most of the work, unifying up to 90% of different entities. When human intervention is necessary, Tamr generates questions for data experts, aggregates responses, and feeds them back into the system. This feedback enables Tamr to continuously improve its accuracy and speed.
Tamr provides a consolidated view of entities and records for any downstream application, via a set of RESTful APIs.
Tamr unveils enterprise platform for scalable, end-to-end data unification
Tamr, Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., today introduced a new version of its scalable data unification platform that lets enterprises continuously deliver better data to decision-makers. The company also announced the addition of GE, Roche and Toyota Motor Europe as customers. Tamr is making the announcements and demonstrating the platform at the Strata + Hadoop World conference in San Jose today through February 20, 2015.
Tamr solutions are designed to help enterprises weed through and organize enterprise data to get high-impact data and analysis into the hands of decision-makers.
“We’re closing the enterprise analytics gap that today separates the big questions you want to ask ─ and the big answers you’re looking for ─ from your huge investments in siloed data,” said Andy Palmer, co-founder and CEO of Tamr. “The Tamr platform puts high-value data integration and enrichment into the hands of more people, so businesses can solve the big P&L-level problems that have been starved for data.”
The new Tamr Platform radically simplifies and speeds the availability of unified data for analytics and downstream applications. It includes new features that deliver value at every stage of data unification ─ catalog, connect, consume ─ and extends scalable data unification capabilities to more people throughout the enterprise.
“Big data integration tools [are] … introducing artificial intelligence … Scaled out to master data management, artificial intelligence provides better and faster governance, and further enforces semantic MDM. This new breed of MDM will be mandatory, not nice to have, for big data strategy to transition from trusted insight for the few to insight for all,” wrote Forrester Research analyst Michele Goetz, in the October 2014 report entitled Brief: Data Governance Disrupts the MDM Status Quo.
Catalog: A Central Inventory of Enterprise Metadata
Tamr Catalog is a new tool for automatically cataloging in a central, platform-neutral place all metadata available to the enterprise as it seeks to answer its big questions. The CIO and CFO can now view an inventory of all of the company’s metadata organized by the logical business entities, versus only 20% to 30% of metadata enumerated based on how they are stored.
Connect: Easier Data Unification across Data Silos
Improvements in scalable data connection simplify and improve data unification, enabling it to be applied to more kinds of data and business problems. Improvements include easier matching of multiple entities by taking into account relationships between them; and enhanced support for Oracle, Hadoop, unstructured data, and user-defined functions via tools such as OpenRefine, Springbok and Data Wrangler. Data analysts and data curators ─ both seasoned and less-experienced ─ benefit.
Consume: Access and Enrich Data via Google Sheets or Excel
Anyone can enrich spreadsheets or other applications with unified data from across the enterprise. Via new APIs and a new spreadsheet plug-in, analysts can find, map and match external data with their internal data in Google Sheets or Excel. Tamr handles the mechanics of data matching and enrichment, prompting users with suggestions and then auto-populating their spreadsheets with new and changed data based on their choices. By being able to manipulate external data as easily as if it were their own, business analysts can use the data to resolve ambiguities, fill in gaps, enrich their data with additional columns and fields, and more.
