Recently, Tamr joined The Board Challenge as a Pledge Partner. This means we are commiting to add at least one Black director to Tamr’s Board of Directors in the next twelve months. Black leaders are significantly under-represented in America’s boardrooms, including ours. It’s time to accelerate change and set an example for others.

As any Founder knows (or should know), intellectual property can protect your valuable ideas from competitors. A little over a year ago at Tamr Karen Cambray (our CFO and Head of Operations) brought in a boutique IP law firm, Panitch Schwarze to help us grow our patent and trademark portfolio. Karen had worked with Panitch Schwarze at a previous successful startup and recommended them based on her positive experience.

John D. Simmons and Clark A. Jablon along with the rest of the team from Panitch Schwarze have blown us away with the results they are now delivering. We will have five newly granted patents this year alone, and we have nine more applications currently pending. One of the recently granted patents on some of our newest and most forward-thinking technology was filed in July 2020 and allowed by the Patent Office in October 2020! …

A few days ago, I had the honor to share the stage with two friends and fellow entrepreneurs: John Evans @ Beam Therapeutics & Mike Salguero @ ButcherBox. I’d like to recognize them for their amazing achievement as Entrepreneur Of The Year 2020 Award winners.

Mike is a true entrepreneur to his core — he and I both frequent Henrietta’s Table and when he started ButcherBox in Harvard Square I was lucky enough to see him almost every week. …

I often say “startups come and go but the relationships between great startup people persist.” My good friend and trusted colleague Nick Malfroy-Camine is the embodiment of this spirit.

At Tamr over the past 6+ years Nick aka “Muscles” has been a core member of our engineering and leadership team. He has built great software but more importantly — he’s been at the core of building an incredible culture of trust, hard work and fun. Muscles is truly someone that embodies our spirit of professional development @ Tamr — having coached many Tamrs not only on how to build great software quickly — but also how to role model the core values @ Tamr in the process. I will miss the excuse to see Muscles on a daily basis at Tamr — but know that he will always be one of my closest friends and most trusted colleagues. …

This article originally appeared on the Tamr Blog.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems promised enterprises that it would make it easier to do business. Instead, enterprises got an information hegemony that today does anything but.

The idea was that the systems would track resources and business commitments in real-time, consolidating activities and data for critical business functions like procurement, sales and payroll on a centralized, common platform (and database).

In his seminal article (1998) on ERP systems in the Harvard Business Review (“Putting the Enterprise in Enterprise Systems”), Tom Davenport cautioned “An enterprise system imposes its own logic on a company’s strategy, culture and organization…Enterprise systems can deliver great rewards, but the risks they carry are equally great.” …

This post was written in conjunction with Nik Bates-Haus; Nabil Hachem, Ph.D.; Matt Holzapfel; and Mark Marinelli of Tamr, Inc.

Data variety — the middle child of the three Vs of Big Data — is in big trouble.

It’s in the critical path of enterprise data becoming an asset. And it’s been slow to benefit from the kind of technology advancements experienced by its “easier” siblings, data volume and data velocity.

Meanwhile, most enterprises have unconsciously built up extreme data variety over the last 50+ years. So extreme that people at large enterprises may not even realize how much variety they actually have until they are elbows-deep in a data-integration project or high-profile strategic-analytics initiative. …