Aussie partners lick lips at AWS' new super-cheap BI tool

Amazon Web Services has released a new business intelligence tool that it claims is "one-tenth the cost of traditional solutions" and allows business users to build complex data analyses "without writing code".

AWS product strategy general manager Dr Matt Wood demonstrated the new QuickSite product in front of a packed crowd of 19,000 at the re:Invent conference today.

The cloud software automatically discovers data sources, analyses data functions and relationships, selects the best visualisation automatically and recommends analyses.

The standard edition starts at US$9 per user per month on a 12-month contract or US$12 for month-to-month. A more advanced 'enterprise edition' – which AWS announced "provides up to twice the throughput and fine-grained access control, supports encryption-at-rest, integrates with your organisation’s Active Directory and includes a few other goodies" – costs US$18 and US$24 respectively,

As well as the low cost, Wood said that the ease-of-use would mean non-technical users would be able to help themselves without drawing on technical labour.

He also claimed that QuickSite's in-memory processing and compilation of queries down to machine level code has lead it to perform at unprecedented speeds. The vendor calls its BI processing engine SPICE – the Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine.

Mark Green, lead solutions architect for Brisbane AWS partner CloudTrek, told CRN that the BI announcement was one of his highlights at the conference: "This enables simplified access to data for a wider variety of people."

"It's a very competitive price and you can embed the visualisations into webpages so that people [without licences] can view dashboards on the intranet."

Wood said on stage said that while users can use the QuickSight interface directly, the service would also integrate into BI products from AWS technology partners such as Domo, Qlik, Tableau, and Tibco.

"It's a bit of a back-handed compliment though," said Aaron Walker, chief technology officer for Melbourne AWS partner base2services. "He mentioned all those other BI tools but [QuickSight] really is huge competition for its BI partners."

Both Walker and Green agreed that the AWS service would open up data analytics to users who have previously been excluded from the business intelligence market, such as SMBs and non-technical business staff.

"It's really an end-user service," Walker said.

Walker and Green also told CRN that both their companies, as managed service providers, would seek to use QuickSight internally for analysing system monitoring and auditing data.

The journalist travelled to AWS re:Invent as a guest of Amazon Web Services.