Amazon Launches Cloud-Powered BI Data Service

Amazon Web Services has announced the launch of Amazon QuickSight, a cloud-based business intelligence platform.

In a Wednesday (Oct. 7) press release, Amazon said that the service enables “employees, regardless of their technical skill, to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis” and glean fast insights into current business practices.

In terms of technology, Amazon said that QuickSight utilizes a “Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine” (nicknamed SPICE) to help provide both data and visualizations of that data. The data collected and maintained by SPICE, the company said, ranges across storage, hardware and machine code generation to allow users to run queries, infer data relationships, present that data visually and then shift those visualizations to other users using a storyboard feature.

As a cloud service, the company said, the platform is able to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, and pricing begins at $9 per user per month, which Amazon touted as “one-tenth the cost” of other, traditional business intelligence solutions.

[bctt tweet=”As a cloud service, Amazon said, the platform is able to scale to hundreds of thousands of users.”]

In a statement accompanying the launch of the service, Raju Gulabani, vice president of database services at Amazon Web Services, said that “in a world increasingly dominated by connected devices and mobile users and where corporate data is moving to the cloud, our customers continue to collect and store massive amounts of their data across a wide range of AWS’ data services. These customers have been asking AWS for an analytics solution that can enable every one of their users to gain insights and make rapid decisions using this data.”

In addition to expanding its technology platform, Amazon Web Services has also been expanding its global footprint in other areas as well. As reported earlier this year, Amazon Web Services said that it would accept bill payments in a cross-border initiative spanning 11 countries.

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