Precisely is a global leader in data integrity that partners with more than 12,000 customers to ensure their data is accurate, consistent, and contextual. The company’s portfolio — including the Precisely Data Integrity Suite — helps integrate disparate data, improve data quality, govern data usage, geocode and analyze location data, and enrich it with complementary datasets for confident business decisions. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Precisely’s EVP and General Manager of Data Enrichment, Dan Adams, to learn more about the company.
Dan Adams’ Background
What is Dan Adams’ background? Adams said:
“I consider myself a data entrepreneur. Since starting my career in 1996, I’ve worked in businesses that build and license data products. I’ve also had the opportunity to manage entire data product systems, ranging from sourcing and field collection to product delivery and support.”
“Before joining Precisely, I served as the Vice President of Data at Pitney Bowes Software and Data, following the acquisition of Maponics, where I was CEO. Additionally, I’ve held senior leadership positions at TomTom, Tele Atlas, and GDT. In short, I’ve led every aspect of the data business through both pre- and post-acquisition phases, with experience in roles from General Manager to COO to CEO.”
“Over the last 28 years, my career has revolved around location-based solutions, including geocoding data, navigation databases, and spatial information. These collective experiences led me to my current role at Precisely. As Executive Vice President and General Manager of Data Enrichment, I oversee the global strategy, development, and execution of the company’s data product operations. I leverage my deep data expertise to help more than 12,000 companies across the globe make more confident decisions based on trusted data.”
“I lead a global team of roughly 160 data professionals across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Poland, and India. I work directly with teams focused on data production and building data products, including engineers, data analysts, data scientists, and data sourcing specialists. Together, we work cross-functionally to drive operational quality and efficiency. Ultimately, we manage and optimize the Precisely data enrichment portfolio, which includes over 400 datasets containing more than 9,000 attributes. This includes demographic data, physical addresses, property attributes, places of interest, and much more.”
“Helping customers achieve their goals is the most dynamic part of my job. I’m constantly talking to customers and partners about their goals and requirements, and how Precisely can meet their needs. I also take this same approach internally, and work with our employees to help them progress and find new opportunities in their own careers. I’ve had valuable support in my own career, so sharing the knowledge and insights I’ve gained from my mentors is very fulfilling.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Adams’ favorite memory working for the company so far? Adams reflected:
“My favorite memory is one that took place last year, when we released an API that marked a significant milestone in our business strategy. The Data Graph API enables access to multiple Precisely datasets, reducing the time and effort it takes to license and use Precisely’s data enrichment portfolio. This achievement required serious effort and collaboration across various departments within our company so, while rigorous, it also brought us together as a team.”
“To celebrate this hard-won achievement in product development, we got together for a Monday morning call, bringing team members from across the globe. It was a moment of shared gratitude and reflection on the journey we’ve taken. While we’d had many meetings throughout the process, this final call captured the heart of our company culture, emphasizing our core values of openness, determination, individuality, and collaboration.”
“Perhaps it sounds like a small example, but it can be all-too-easy to forget to take a moment to celebrate success when you’re so focused on driving exciting innovation. Precisely is a place where we take the time to appreciate our accomplishments and the collective effort behind them. This experience reinforced my pride in being part of a team that values both dedication and meaningful reflection, and it will go down as one of my favorite memories.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Adams explained:
“Precisely offers a unique combination of software, data enrichment, and data strategy consulting designed to support customers wherever they are on their data journey. Our comprehensive portfolio of data integrity solutions, including the Precisely Data Integrity Suite, combine to integrate, improve, govern, enrich, and reveal the hidden context of data whether it lives on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid environments.”
“Business leaders increasingly see the importance of data-driven decision-making in staying ahead of the competition, navigating changing economic and regulatory landscapes, and driving advanced analytics and AI initiatives. For example, 76% of data and analytics professionals cited data-driven decision-making as the leading goal of their data programs. The challenge is that many organizations also realize that they need to trust their data more in order to be confident in making the decisions necessary to drive their business forward. Our data integrity solutions support customers, including 93 of the Fortune 100, to build accurate, consistent, and contextual data to fuel decisions they can truly rely on.”
Evolution of Precisely’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Adams noted:
“Precisely is a data pioneer with decades of deep domain expertise. Since 1968, we’ve been helping businesses leverage their mainframe data more securely and cost-effectively. More than 55 years later, we still excel at helping customers unlock the true value of data held on mainframes but have evolved to become the global leader in data integrity — enabling businesses to access trusted data across any environment, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or a combination of both.”
“In 2020, we recognized the need for trusted data to fuel digital transformation, rebranded from Syncsort to Precisely, and launched our exceptional data integrity portfolio. Since then, innovation has continued to snowball. In the past four years, Precisely has acquired seven companies, including Infogix, a data governance company, and Winshuttle, an SAP process automation and master data management company. The convergence of these offerings positioned us as a data giant ready to arm our customers with a combination of data integrity and location-enhanced data.”
“Last year, we introduced Spatial Analytics and Data Enrichment services for the Precisely Data Integrity Suite, helping customers unlock valuable context within their data. With Spatial Analytics, users can uncover patterns, trends, and relationships in location-based datasets — seamlessly integrating these insights into business processes, interactive maps, and ready-made reports. The addition of the Data Enrichment service allows customers to augment their data with trusted and relevant third-party datasets, transforming it into a complete, consistent, and reliable business asset that leads to more accurate predictions and helps fuel trustworthy models.
More recently, we rolled out several key advancements to the Data Integrity Suite including AI Manager, which enables customers to leverage Generative AI capabilities within the Data Integrity Suite while maintaining complete control over data sovereignty and compliance. Additionally, we enhanced the user experience and improved performance of the Data Governance service and expanded data integration capabilities across ecosystems, including Snowflake, for the Data Integration service. These advancements enable organizations the ability to navigate their data and AI initiatives with confidence.”
Recent Company News
What recent company news has there been that you would like to share? Adams pointed out:
“Our mission is to simplify our customers’ data experience, and we’re consistently taking a customer-first approach to our offerings. A common challenge we hear from customers is the struggle they face in bringing together data from multiple providers, particularly given the lack of standardization across different datasets. It makes it incredibly difficult to integrate datasets, forcing data teams to do the heavy lifting on resolving duplicates, validating records, and ensuring consistency – a process that gets repeated every single time a new data source is introduced!
To address this, we recently launched Data Link, a strategic partner program designed to streamline the integration of the Precisely data portfolio with trusted third-party datasets. By pre-linking datasets from providers including Dun & Bradstreet, Overture Maps Foundation, GeoX Analytics, and Regrid, Data Link transforms the complexity of mapping disparate third-party datasets into a seamless experience. I like to refer to it as a “universal data adapter”, allowing customers to pick the best data for their needs without being limited by a specific vendor’s ID system or tedious processes for mapping and standardizing. The launch of Data Link is game-changing for our customers and I’m looking forward to being able to announce new partners joining the program soon.
“We also recently announced several new location intelligence and data enrichment capabilities available via Snowflake Marketplace, including Geo Addressing and Data Graph Snowflake Native Apps and expanded data offerings. With the latest updates, customers can perform geo addressing tasks and enrichment directly within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, helping to reduce the costly inefficiencies of poor-quality address data and enabling enhanced location-based insights that provide a deeper understanding of audiences and risk levels.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Adams about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“It’s truly humbling to see the real-world impacts of trusted data, and a great example of this is our work with San Bernardino County in California. As part of our company’s commitment to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives, we provide fire safe councils across the country with access to wildfire risk data. The data allows these councils to see which regions are more likely to experience wildfires alongside the corresponding severity level. It also helps to show how risk increases or decreases based on different scenarios and variables. With the dramatic increase in wildfires across California in the past few years, the data has been crucial in helping the fire safe councils make more confident wildfire risk decisions and successfully source grant money to implement lifesaving protocols in the region.”
“Many of our customers also leverage data enrichment capabilities to help drive innovation within their fields of expertise, including through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives. For example, Generali Real Estate, one of the world’s leading real estate asset managers, relies on Precisely Points of Interest (POI) data to power their cloud-based location intelligence platform, City Forward. The City Forward platform uses over 800 variables and 30 different AI/ML models to deliver intelligence for investment analysis and real estate valuation, including sustainability considerations such as carbon emissions and climate action. Precisely POI data plays a critical role by delivering comprehensive information on business locations, leisure hot spots, and other geographic features. The data helps reveal hidden insights about real estate assets and drive confident decision-making across a range of important uses, such as retail site selection, urban planning, geo-targeted marketing, and more.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Adams affirmed:
“Precisely’s unique offering lies in the powerful combination of our software capabilities, comprehensive data enrichment portfolio, and expert data strategy consultancy team. We ensure our data products work seamlessly with our software and integrate smoothly with each other, which, as many data professionals will tell you, isn’t necessarily common.”
“With the explosion of advanced technology such as AI, businesses increasingly realize the importance of trustworthy data in driving reliable outcomes. The truth is that many are still missing the complete picture of what goes into maintaining the integrity of their data. We support our customers by helping them ensure their data is accurate, consistent, and, crucially, augmented with rich, relevant context. Curated datasets add more detail to what businesses (and AI models) know about places, people, properties, businesses, and environmental risk factors. This helps reveal previously hidden patterns, providing deeper context for more confident decisions and contextually appropriate responses.”
Our unique address identifier, PreciselyID, directly links detailed information about specific locations, such as apartments, suite numbers, and units within the same building. It serves as the single reference point for joining multiple datasets, significantly simplifying data interoperability and eliminating time-consuming spatial processing. Customers can match ID to ID to join data from different sources, efficiently processing records in bulk. This streamlined approach enhances data accuracy and efficiency, setting Precisely apart from the competition.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Adams concluded:
“I want Precisely to be known as the company you go to extend your data enrichment capabilities most efficiently. The launch of Data Link marked a critical step towards mastering interoperability by seamlessly associating and linking data from different suppliers. We plan to expand the network of partners within the Data Link program and provide customers access to the datasets they need to meet their evolving requirements. I’m incredibly energized about the potential for even greater collaboration and innovation in the future. Every new partner strengthens our ecosystem and provides the tools to solve even more of the challenges our joint customers face.
