Channel Insider content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

The biggest limiting factor to big data is finding a way to make all that information accessible to the people who can make the most use of it. To help address that challenge, Tamr developed a platform that uses machine learning algorithms to identify relationships between different types of data sets.

Tamr, a startup company founded in 2013, is looking for help from the channel to take that technology to market.

Tamr launched a partner program that spans both vendors providing complementary products and systems integrators that deploy these technologies. Companies participating in the Tamr Partner Network include Cloudera, Hortonworks, MicroStrategy, Qlik, Recorded Future, Statwing, Tableau Software and Zoomdata.

CEO Andy Palmer—who founded Tamr, along with database industry expert Michael Stonebraker—said the problem the company’s data connection is seeking to solve is making it possible to unify data sources in a way that makes information more actionable. Instead of trying to normalize all that data in a single location, Palmer said, Tamr makes it possible to use machine learning algorithms and application programming interfaces (APIs) to establish the relationship between different types and classes of data where they reside.

Once those relationships are established as metadata with Tamr, data analysts can better correlate the business value of that data without having to move it all into a central data warehouse.

Tamr can even query data analysts for additional information about data sets it perceives might be related to each other, Palmer said. “It has a built-in auto-suggestion capability,” he said. “It’s really designed to create a system of reference within an organization.”

The new platform enables data scientists to focus on analyzing data rather than spending most of their time on big data infrastructure plumbing issues, Palmer said.

For all the hype surrounding big data, organizations of all sizes are clearly struggling to turn all that information into something that transforms the business. For solution providers in the channel, Tamr is betting that the opportunity to help customers make sense of all that data is going to wind up being a much bigger opportunity than the actual building of the platforms used to house it.

Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.