- As expected, AWS chief Andy Jassy's keynote at the annual AWS re:Invent conference (webcast) hasn't been short on product announcements. Perhaps the biggest is QuickSight, a cloud-based business intelligence/analytics service that integrates with AWS cloud storage and database services, and which Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN -0.2%) claims will allow customers to start visualizing data within 60 seconds.
- The WSJ recently reported an analytics solution was on tap. Much like BI/analytics tools from Tableau (DATA), QLIK, Microsoft, and Salesforce (among others), Amazon is looking to appeal to non-technical corporate workers, many of whom still use Excel spreadsheets for data analysis and reporting.
- As usual, Amazon is pricing aggressively: It claims QuickSight will cost 1/10 as much as rival products (rivals might beg to differ). Analysts defending the market's existing players have argued Amazon's solution will appeal more to SMBs than enterprises, given enterprises have preferred on-premise BI solutions.
- Also launching: Snowball, a 50TB storage appliance for clients that need to transfer huge amounts of data to AWS. A built-in Kindle acts as an automatic shipping label.
- Other product announcements: 1) A service for migrating databases to AWS, a schema conversion tool for making databases AWS-friendly, and support for the open-source MariaDB database. 2) Kinesis Firehose, a data-transfer solution for the Kinesis real-time data streaming service (launched in 2013). 3) Inspector, a tool for detecting potential security and compliance issues with AWS-run apps.
- Amazon's AWS revenue totaled $1.82B in Q2 (+81% Y/Y), and op. income $391M. For the 12 months ending in June, revenue totaled $6B.
- Last year's AWS re:Invent announcements
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Update: Also announced: IT consulting/outsourcing giant Accenture is forming a new business group to help companies migrate workloads to AWS. Accenture and AWS plan to invest significant resources over multiple years in the development of new services and technology solutions including application migration and development, cloud-based enterprise applications, and analytics and Big Data solutions. The companies are committed to train an additional 1,000 Accenture professionals and certify 500 Accenture professionals on the AWS Cloud in the first year, and support go-to-market activities."
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Update 2: One thing not announced today: AWS price cuts. Jassy insists Amazon simply isn't choosing to focus on price cuts at re:Invent. "Prices will continue to go down. Prices went down several times already this year."