Amazon Launches QuickSight Business Intelligence Service For AWS

At its annual re:Invent developer conference, Amazon today announced a new business intelligence service for its AWS platform. The new service, called QuickSight, will help AWS customers start visualizing their data within 60 seconds.

As Amazon stressed, it wanted to create a service that is as easy to use as possible. This means it’ll work with the data that users already store on various Amazon services, including S3, RedShift, DynamoDB and Kinesis. Users can then share their analysis with others and embed their visualizations and create live dashboards (both on the web and inside native mobile apps on iOS and Android).

The service will be powered by a new Amazon in-memory query engine (called SPICE — for Super-Fast Parallel In-Memory Computation Engine), as well as Amazon’s other cloud services. The company says the service will cost about a tenth of comparable services.

With this launch, Amazon enters a highly competitive market that includes competitors like IBM and Microsoft (with Power BI), as well as startups like Tableau and others. Interestingly, though, SPICE will also be available to third-party vendors like Tableau.

AWS re:Invent 2015