Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and Tamr: Combining Market Leading Cloud-Native Data Mastering and Next-Gen Cloud Services to Drive Analytical Outcomes

As the center of gravity for enterprise data moves to the cloud, modern data driven enterprises are just beginning to scratch the surface of their newfound, highly elastic scalable compute and persistence resources that are necessary to accelerate digital transformations. Many large enterprises have realized that the first step in digital transformation is managing their data as an asset. That requires cloud-native data management solutions that break down inefficient data silos to realize the promise of analytic driven business outcomes – saving money, driving growth or reducing risk. At Tamr, our mission is to enable organizations like GSK and Creative Artists Agency to quickly and easily master their data to deliver tangible business value. To help achieve that goal, we’ve established a winning partnership with Microsoft Azure.

Tamr and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics: Breaking down data silos with machine learning and the cloud

Over the past 30 years, large enterprises have worked hard via data warehouses, data marts and data lakes to consolidate disparate data and create a single point of reference data to power their analytics. Most of these initiatives have fallen short of expectations and the cost of maintenance is too high. 

Traditionally, organizations have relied on technologies such as rules-based master data management (MDM) to integrate data. However, these methods have failed to scale due to brittle rule-based logic that is costly to maintain and time-consuming to change. What’s more, traditional tools do not engage the business users who are driving the requirements and will be consuming the results. This creates analytic and operational gulfs between data and actual outcomes.

In order to deliver the quality of reference data required for next generation analytics (descriptive, predictive and prescriptive) as well as AI applications, large enterprises need to embrace cloud- based data mastering that uses human guided machine learning to organize, harmonize and clean their data. Using machine learning to master data requires large quantities of elastic compute that only exist on cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure.  

Tamr’s Azure-native data mastering solution uses purpose built machine learning combined with feedback from data citizens to do the heavy lifting required for large enterprises to connect thousands of rapidly changing internal and external data sources. Tamr uses Azure’s elastic and ephemeral capabilities to scale resources as required to do iterative data mastering while generating unprecedented cost savings compared to on-premise deployments. Most importantly, Tamr data mastering deployments running on cloud-native platforms such as Microsoft Azure complete as much as 90% faster than on premise efforts. And not waiting for physical hardware provisioning alone saves up to 40% of time. 

Used together, Tamr running on Microsoft Azure powers the business-oriented views required to deliver analytics-ready data into cloud based data warehouses running on next-gen cloud based databases such as Azure Synapse Analytics, which is now generally available. Tamr enables companies to automate a significant portion of data mastering by leveraging Spark to keep data within Synapse complete, accurate, and up-to-date in an ongoing way.

To learn how Tamr and Synapse can help your organization break down data silos and drive analytical outcomes, schedule a demo with a Tamr data engineering expert.

Tamr is proud to partner with Microsoft Azure and be selected as an Azure Synapse Analytics launch partner. Many of our customers rely on Microsoft Azure as key to their cloud migration strategies. Tamr enables the creation of mastered datasets that are curated, clean, and comprehensive. These datasets drive timely analytics, operational and AI projects and drive business. Tamr’s native integration with Microsoft Azure enables our customers to quickly and easily master key data.

Azure Purview and Tamr: Turning data governance into a strategic initiative

As organizations expand their data engineering ecosystems to ensure that data is accessible to the right people at the right time, discoverability across hundreds or even thousands of sources has played an important role in modernizing data governance.

Tamr’s partnership and deep product integration is expanding as Tamr is also a launch partner for Azure Purview. The first step to data governance is identifying relevant data sources for critical business entities (e.g., customers, suppliers) and resolving the differences between those sources. Tamr naturally supports Azure Purview’s unified data governance service that lets organizations achieve a complete understanding of their data. Azure Purview helps discover all data across an organization, track lineage of data, and create a business glossary wherever it is stored: on-premise, across clouds, in SaaS applications, or in Power BI. 

Tamr’s work with global data leaders at the world’s largest companies has resulted in many best practices. Using broad data discovery that leverage x-source ID’s for key entities (we call these Tamr IDs) helps inform which sources should be mastered, categorized, and de-duplicated to streamline data governance programs and downstream business use cases is essential for success based on our work. Integrated data discovery and governance that leverages Tamr’s capabilities to master and enrich data ensure that organizations can trust the completeness and accuracy of their data, and that it is accessible for data consumers to leverage mastered data that’s needed for all data consuming projects as well as to remediate source systems.

What to look for when partnering with a data management vendor

As a former CIO and Head of Data Engineering at a Global 2000 company, I believe that avoiding single vendor, single platform style vendors is critical. Of course, this means that partnering with vendors that are cloud-first and support open, best of breed architectures is essential. In the modern enterprise, data organizations that focus on implementing interoperability through APIs is critical in order to take advantage of new technologies and prevent any one vendor from locking you in. Tamr is well positioned to help organizations in this front – we have worked hard to design our software to be cloud native and API first from the beginning. We’re the only cloud-native data mastering solution running on Azure and our integration with Azure enables easy migrations to the cloud.

Tamr is committed to working with Microsoft to provide enterprises with the cloud expertise and data mastering technology they need to drive transformational business outcomes using Azure and Synapse.