AWS launches QuickSight business intelligence tool out of preview

Public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced that its QuickSight cloud-based business intelligence (BI) service is now available after being in preview for more than a year.

The tool lets people connect data in existing repositories or upload new data to AWS, get data ready for analysis, query it, and chart it out. Supported sources include Salesforce, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and MariaDB, as well as AWS services like Aurora, S3, Relational Database Service (RDS), and Redshift.

More than 1,500 AWS customers used the service during the preview, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. (Among them are Edmunds.com, Hotelbeds, Infor, and MLB Advanced Media, according to a statement.) And the cost — free for a single user and $9 per user otherwise — is low enough that it “could position Amazon as a more serious player in the $15.2 billion BI and analytics platform market,” as Gartner analysts Rita L. Sallam, Cindi Howson, Josh Parenteau, and Terilyn Palanca wrote when QuickSight was first announced.

At this point, the service is only available through three of AWS’ data center regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland), Barr wrote.

The thing to point out here is that while AWS is the biggest they get in terms of cloud infrastructure providers — it brought in $3.2 billion in revenue in the third quarter — it operates many services, and they don’t all receive very frequent updates. Some companies — Domo, GoodData, Qlik, and Tableau — operate mostly or exclusively in the BI business. And other public cloud infrastructure providers, like IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle offer cloud BI services.