Amazon Web Services (AWS), traditionally known for its cloud computing services, has entered the business intelligence (BI) space.
The company unveiled its Amazon QuickSight tool during the ongoing AWS re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas.
Following the product release, Andy Jassy, senior VP at AWS and Amazon Infrastructure, told ITWeb this is a first time the company has ventured into the multibillion-dollar BI market.
According to a recent research by Markets and Markets, the BI market is expected to grow from $13.9 billion in 2013 to $20.8 billion by 2018, at an estimated CAGR of 8.3% from 2013 to 2018.
Gartner says the global BI market has traditionally been dominated by vendors such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, SAS Institute and Microsoft, among others.
Jassy pointed out that although AWS has had "strong presence in the analytics space, there has been no BI offering of late". However, he revealed AWS customers convinced the company to come up with a BI tool to complement its analytics offerings.
AWS says Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-powered BI service that enables organisations to build visualisations, perform ad hoc analysis, and get business insights from their data. The BI solution uses a new in-memory calculation engine to perform advanced calculations and render visualisations.
The company adds that Amazon QuickSight integrates automatically with AWS data services, enables organisations to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, and delivers query performance via the tool's query engine.
Jassy explained that too often, BI solutions require teams of data engineers to spend months building complex data models before ever generating a report, and these solutions lack interactive data exploration and visualisation, limiting users to canned reports and pre-selected queries.
On-premises BI tools also require companies to invest in complex and costly hardware and software, and then require them to invest in even more infrastructure to maintain fast query performance as database sizes grow, he added.
"This cost and complexity makes it difficult for companies to make BI ubiquitous across their organisations."
Pricing for Amazon QuickSight starts at $9 per user, per month.
The company also introduced a slew of other new products during the conference. It unveiled AWS Snowball, a petabyte-scale data transport appliance that can transfer 50TB per appliance of data into and out of AWS.
According to Jassy, enterprises that need to transfer large amounts of data to AWS face a challenge - the time it takes to upload data.
"For instance, if a company committed 100 megabits per second of its total bandwidth capacity to transferring data to AWS, transferring 100TB of data via that connection would take about 100 days," he explained.
"Companies could choose to spend more money expanding their bandwidth capability or upgrading their network, but most don't want to do so simply to support sending more data to the cloud. With AWS Snowball - a portable storage appliance - they can move that same 100TB of data to AWS in less than a week."
AWS also announced Amazon Kinesis Firehose, a managed service for loading streaming data into AWS. It released Amazon Kinesis Streams to allow organisations to build applications that collect, process, and analyse streaming data with very high throughput.
The company also boosted its database portfolio with the introduction of new database tools and services. The new AWS Database Migration Service allows users to migrate their production Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL databases to AWS, the company explains.
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