Amazon unveils its cloud BI tool QuickSight

Amazon has officially unveiled its business intelligence service Amazon QuickSight. With claims of providing BI for big data at 1/10th the cost of traditional on-premise solutions, the product will be available in preview later this month.  QuickSight is equipped to handle various types of data-intensive workloads including ad targeting, customer segmentation, forecasting and planning, marketing and sales analytics, inventory and shipment tracking, IoT device stream management and clickstream analysis. Designed to access data from different sources, both on-premise and cloud, there is built-in support for Redshift, RDS, Amazon Aurora, EMR, DynamoDB, Kinesis, S3, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and flat files. Connectors allow access to data stored in third-party sources such as Salesforce. Amazon built QuickSight from ground up around SPICE – the Super-fast, Parallel, In-memry Calculation Engine. The company is working with several other partners including Domo, Qlik, Tableau and Tibco. Here is a screenshot that shows an example of what QuickSight can help organizatins do:  This announcement comes as no surprise as reports were already doing rounds about a service like this in the making. Amazon has work cut out for itself with powerhouses like Microsoft and IBM already in the race with Power BI and Cognos and a plethora of other smaller stand-alone cloud BI players cutting their niche in the market.