Amazon Web Services have confirmed that the Amazon QuickSight platform is now available to all customers.
QuickSight makes it easy for all employees within a company – regardless of their technical skill – to build visualisations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data. More than 1,500 AWS customers, including global enterprises and startups from a range of industries, have been using Amazon QuickSight during its preview.
Amazon QuickSight connects to AWS and non-AWS data sources and boasts fast the query performance for its Parallel, In-Memory Calculation Engine (called SPICE).
The volume of data businesses create and process is growing every day. To get the most value out of this data, customers need to make it easy for all employees, regardless of their technical skill, to analyse data and share insights with others to drive decisions.
However, the cost and complexity of traditional BI solutions prohibit most companies from making analytics ubiquitous across their organizations because these solutions require investments in costly on-premises hardware and software, weeks or months of data engineering time to build complex data models, and ongoing investments in additional infrastructure to maintain fast query performance as data sets grow.
QuickSight is built from the ground up to solve these problems by bringing the scale and flexibility of the AWS Cloud to business analytics. Getting started with Amazon QuickSight is simple and fast. Customers simply log in to Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon QuickSight automatically discovers their data stored in AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Simple Storage Service. Amazon QuickSight also connects to third-party data sources such as Microsoft Excel or Salesforce.com.
SPICE
QuickSight formats the data and moves it to SPICE so it can be visualised in Amazon QuickSight, and customers can choose to keep the data in SPICE up-to-date as the data in the underlying sources change.
“Amazon QuickSight makes business analytics much easier, more accessible, cost effective, and faster than ever before,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Database Services, Amazon Web Services.
“Because so many companies store data in AWS, it’s very appealing to these customers that Amazon QuickSight can automatically discover their data in AWS, move it to SPICE, and return query results so quickly – all for one-tenth the cost of traditional BI solutions.”
Built from the ground up for the cloud, SPICE uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations, and machine code generation to allow users to run interactive queries on large datasets and get rapid responses – even with thousands of users all simultaneously performing interactive analysis across a wide variety of AWS data sources.
As users explore their data, Amazon QuickSight infers data types and relationships, issues optimal queries to extract relevant data, aggregates the results in the SPICE engine, and provides suggestions for the best possible visualisations of the data – from bar and line graphs to pie charts and scatter plots or heat maps and pivot tables.
The Enterprise Edition of Amazon QuickSight includes all Standard Edition features as well as support for Active Directory integration and encryption at rest and will be available in the coming weeks.
Pricing for Amazon QuickSight starts at $9.00 per user, per month – one-tenth the cost of traditional BI solutions, AWS are quick to point out – so customers of all sizes can make rich business analytics functionality available to all of their employees. To get started with Amazon QuickSight, visit https://quicksight.aws
