Customer 360 In Action:

ThinkData Works & Senzing Showcase a Unified Data Solution

At the 2025 Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, ThinkData Works and Senzing discussed their partnership and demonstrated ThinkData Works’ Customer 360 solution in two informative sessions. Scott Taylor (aka The Data Whisperer) interviewed Brendan Stennett, Co-Founder and CTO of ThinkData Works.

Later, Brendan and Anthony Farinha from Senzing hosted a comprehensive demo of the ThinkData Works Customer 360 solution with Senzing Inside™. These presentations show how organizations can utilize virtual data integration and entity resolution to overcome fragmented data challenges and unlock the full potential of their customer data – wherever it resides.

Stennett explains ThinkData Works’ core mission: “We are a data virtualization company. We specialize in allowing organizations to connect to siloed data assets, regardless of where they live within the organization, and expose them as a single virtual database.” This approach solves one of the most persistent data challenges – siloed data – without requiring disruptive data migration initiatives.

When customer data is scattered across different parts of a business, it’s nearly impossible to create a reliable baseline or master record. Traditionally, companies assumed the only fix was to physically centralize and manually clean their data – a process that’s time-consuming, costly, and risky. Fortunately, there’s a better way. Stennett explains: “You don’t have to go through a large lift cloud data migration. You can leave everything where it is, connect to it and expose it as a single virtual database.”

When connecting siloed data sources to create a consolidated data layer, it’s critical to identify when records from different systems represent the same entity. Stennett explains: “You might have different operations supported by the company that use different customer IDs. You might have your retail point of sale with one ID and your online business with another.” In these types of scenarios, it’s difficult for most systems to determine whether similar yet different records are in fact the same individual or not.

Senzing® entity resolution addresses these complex data matching challenges with sophisticated, purpose-built matching algorithms. It excels at accurately identifying matches across disparate systems, even when dealing with incomplete data, naming variations and inconsistent formatting. Senzing goes beyond simple record matching by detecting non-obvious relationships between entities and providing explainable results that build trust in the system’s matching decisions.

From energy to finance, the ThinkData Works Customer 360 solution with Senzing Inside delivers critical insights for organizations struggling with fragmented data and incomplete customer views. In his talk, Stennett highlights energy companies, stating, “They can have very challenging issues because their data is spread out across multiple systems…through consolidation or M&A activity.” With this scattered data landscape, it is difficult to determine whether or not certain identities represent the same individual across systems and accounts.

The C360 solution delivers value by connecting siloed data assets and providing significant business advantages:

• Creates 360-degree global customer profiles across systems without data migration
• Supports targeted marketing campaigns with comprehensive customer insights
• Improves customer experiences through complete relationship awareness
• Reveals total customer value across business units and channels
• Identifies cross-selling opportunities previously hidden by data silos
• Facilitates efficient report-building and operations

With a consistent, auditable Customer 360 view, organizations can now reliably answer fundamental questions that were previously difficult or impossible to address due to fragmented data.

Businesses actively engaged in mergers and acquisitions see immediate value in this approach. It enables a unified view of customer data across multiple ERP systems and inherited CRMs, addressing the challenge of standardization. By resolving distributed customer information without the burden of data migration or extensive data cleansing, organizations save time and money – and can put their data to work right away in downstream business use cases. This early unified perspective allows decision-makers to gain vital insights during the acquisition process, enabling more informed integration planning and accelerated value realization from the combined entities.

In a comprehensive demonstration, Stennett shows how the platform connects to diverse data sources, creates unified customer views and provides comprehensive data governance. The demo illustrates how Senzing entity resolution unifies seemingly disconnected customer records from point-of-sale (POS) systems and other enterprise databases, like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Using the example of a customer named “Alice Johnson” who appears in two systems with different spellings and IDs, Stennett illustrates the platform’s consolidation capabilities. By feeding the data through the ThinkData Works C360 solution with Senzing, the platform automatically creates a consolidated entity view that links all of Alice’s orders across systems. The challenge of determining total purchase volume across channels becomes solvable.

The platform seamlessly incorporates both internal and third-party data sources, when needed, to enhance customer profiles with additional context and insights. Organizations can import any structured dataset, whether from internal databases and flat files or external sources.

The ThinkData Works platform not only consolidates distributed data, it also centralizes governance through an intuitive user interface, making it easy to manage access, ensure compliance and maintain a complete audit trail on data from generation to application. Organizations can enforce consistent governance policies and role-based access controls from a central platform, supporting accountability and regulatory compliance without adding administrative overhead.

00:18  Introduction to ThinkData Works
Brendan Stennett explains the company’s virtual data approach to connecting siloed data assets.

01:20  Integration with Senzing
How Senzing resolves records with different customer IDs and name variations.

02:52  Energy Sector Applications
Examples of how energy companies overcome data fragmentation through the integrated solution.

03:52  Mergers & Acquisitions Use Case
Details on how the platform helps acquisitive companies create unified data views before data migration.

00:00  Platform Overview
Anthony Farinha introduces Brendan Stennett, who explains ThinkData Works’ data virtualization capabilities.

01:00  Customer Data Integration
A demonstration of how customer records from different systems are consolidated through Senzing entity resolution.

05:40  Data Governance Features
How organizations can filter and share specific data slices with appropriate teams.