Amazon takes on business intelligence with QuickSight

October 7, 2015, 4:24 PM UTC
Barb Darrow

Amazon Web Services, already a big player in databases, is launching a new business intelligence tool to help non-technical people make sense of all that data.

QuickSight, now in preview, is a “very fast cloud-powered business intelligence service,” according to Amazon (AMZN) senior vice president Andy Jassy, speaking at AWS Re:invent in Las Vegas.

QuickSight promises to enable business users to peer inside the data residing in various AWS repositories, including RedShift data warehouse, Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon relational database services. There they can see relationships between data, the company said.

Then a tool called Autograph can help them build an intelligence profile about all that data, said Matt Wood, general manager of product strategy for AWS.

But some, including Forrester Research senior analyst Paul Miller, see SPICE (for Super-fast Parallel In-memory Calculation Engine), as the real key here.

This is part of Amazon’s push to make services relevant to business users as well as the developers who have driven the public cloud’s success so far.

Oh, and QuickSight will be 1/10th the cost of traditional BI tools, which went unnamed although Jassy noted a tool with a name that rhymes with “Hognos,” a reference to IBM’s (IBM) Cognos BI tool but it’s not hard to see QuickSight competing down the road with tools like Tableau as well, Miller said.

This story will be updated during the Re:Invent keynote.

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This story was updated with additional analyst comment and to correct the spelling of QuickSight.

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