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Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

• vkb 11y ago
  Having worked in some form BI for almost the entirety of my career now, there is not a single, consistent form of BI dashboard that is prevalent across any company. Every solution ends up being unique, because every company has a unique data set-up, stakeholders, definition of metrics, and access needs. I've worked with Tableau, Domo, Oracle products, you name it. What's the solution that is passed around the most? Excel sheets, because they travel easily and have all-around permissions. I've been waiting for an out-of-the-box solution that's at least relatively easy to leverage across different organizations, but I haven't seen a painless one yet. I'm hopeful that Quicksight, while not the be-all end-all solution, provides an example for others to follow, if it does end up being easy to set up and use.
  • 6stringmerc 11y ago
    I'm not really a BI guy by trade, though I've developed related skills over time. My expertise is in communications. Specifically responding to RFPs/RFIs/SOQs, and marketing collateral. Whenever I see a program such as this, I'm definitely impressed. Then, a little voice comes into my head, one from having spent years in the RFP and presentation trenches... "Put this in a PowerPoint slide." Point being, for internal use it's nice, but it may not be that different from what other software already does with proper data input (e.g. Excel).
    • polskibus 11y ago
      I lead a team that develops a more advanced BI toolkit, that apart from supporting all typical BI scenarios, handles PPTX export very well (generating 50+ quarterly presentation for investors, etc.). If you're interested, drop us a line at www.binoclebi.com.
  • adammichaelc 11y ago
    I work at Domo, in the team that covers the Bay Area. How long ago did you use the product? We dogfood it obsessively internally. Have found it extremely frictionless on the sharing side. Two ways to share: 1. For an internal use case, you can native "@-tag" any other user. https://www.domo.com/product/domobuzz https://www.domo.com/product/domobuzz 2. For an external sharing use-case, you can share a slideshow. Live example (fake data): https://modocorp.domo.com/link/rFgvIVi32QpwmthO https://modocorp.domo.com/link/rFgvIVi32QpwmthO
    • vkb 11y ago
      I use it regularly. It's not so much about sharing,which is easy and works well, but about getting data into Domo. Pain point to format data and schedule exports, update them, set up new exports, etc.
      • adammichaelc 11y ago
        Got it. Is it a data-source you're pulling in from a connector, or from an on-prem system? We've recently added almost 100 self-serve connectors. https://www.domo.com/connectors https://www.domo.com/connectors I've been talking to the product team a lot about related feedback lately. If you want to share your thoughts, I'd love to take them down, and make sure they get to the right folks. Also, have you seen the new export API? It could solve part of the problem you mention. adam.chavez at domo
      • terussell85 11y ago
        Just wanted to reemphasize sibling comment's petition for feedback on Domo. I work on the data pipeline team at Domo, and we love hearing ways to make the process simpler for our users. If you haven't already, be sure to ping adammichaelc with your use case and problems.
  • poutine 11y ago
    At Telemetry (https://www.telemetryapp.com https://www.telemetryapp.com) we're trying to solve this issue which is quite a bit more difficult than it initially seems. We're not a BI tool though, just a transmission, management and visualization layer. Keeping dashboards persistently up and running on televisions, provision mobile devices with granular permissions and enterprise features like SSO. We provide an agent to integrate on the client side to help send metrics from whatever data source you may have. Take a look, I'd love to know your thoughts.
  • deleted 11y ago
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  • 5h 11y ago
    Excel also has a pretty easy to understand xml import, At my a new gig I've just avoided having to write add 'just one more report' to the fragile homebrew report designer by letting people pull out structured data and make their own reports. Code required was trivial & the risk was super low as we could just use existing API methods to get the XML out. This has caught my eye though, so I'll have a tinker in the morning.
    • mistermann 11y ago
      I'd be interested to learn more about this, I've never heard of anyone importing XML into Excel before - typically "flat files" or SQL datasets are imported into an Excel table, upon which you can quickly build a pivot table, etc. Are you pulling in nested data?
      • 5h 11y ago
        yes, exactly that, drag an xml file into excel, choose "generate a schema", then you can drag and drop fields from your nested structure, parent records will be repeated intelligently for nested sub-records.
      • discordance 11y ago
        I import nested XML into Excel all the time. You will need to create an XML Map first. Look under Excel/Developer/XML Source/XML Maps
  • thingsilearned 11y ago
    Hi Vicki, I'm the founder of Chartio.com here. Not sure if you've given us a look yet (or lately) but we pride ourselves on being as usable and flexible as possible. Would love to show you more: dave@chartio.com
  • JBReefer 11y ago
    Isn't that exactly what TM1 does?
• nostromo 11y ago
  At first glance, this seems like a Tableau competitor. So I'm surprised to see Tableau listed as a partner.
  • codezero 11y ago
    Embrace then exterminate.
  • sokoloff 11y ago
    Looks like Tableau is a front-end option with AWS QS doing the grunt work of the data handling and digestion.
    • slg 11y ago
      What is the point of this then? Tableau can directly connect to most of these data sources already. Is this meant as a replacement for a data warehouse to take transactional information into a format that is quicker to report on? EDIT: After reading into this more it seems like Quicksight is Amazon's version of Tableau and connects to SPICE which is Amazon's version of a data warehouse. If you prefer Tableau, you can apparently connect that directly to SPICE. If you already have Tableau connected to a data warehouse, this would appear to be a new competitor to the market and wouldn't add anything to your specific setup (beyond Amazon's claims that they will do it better).
    • chenster 11y ago
      Tableau offers both desktop and server edition for data visualization. AWS QS also does data visualization but doesn't offer a desktop version. They are competitors. Once Amazon enters a market, game's over. It becomes a race to the bottom red ocean.
  • liscovich 11y ago
    Looker (http://www.looker.com http://www.looker.com), Periscope (http://www.periscope.io http://www.periscope.io), Mode Analytics (http://www.modeanalytics.com http://www.modeanalytics.com), and Chart.io (http://www.chart.io http://www.chart.io) should probably be even more worried than Tableau.
• andrewstuart2 11y ago
  I'm glad to see they put a little more effort into the product page for this release than seems typical for AWS products. It's much easier on the eyes and, at least for me, much more readable.
  • ececconi 11y ago
    It's because this product is probably aimed more at the business side of the company as opposed to being a pure technology product.
  • BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    Now they just need to modernize the AWS web console :) Seriously though this product page is a huge improvement over some of their previous releases so kudos to them.
    • gdulli 11y ago
      My god I would be thrilled if there could just be a usable S3 filesystem browser.
• smileysteve 11y ago
  They mention integration with RDS, which is kind of scary considering the data a lot of databases hold.
• deleted 11y ago
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• tidon12 11y ago
  Seems like a cool way to further increase the "stickiness" of AWS
• ececconi 11y ago
  I've been working exclusively in implementing BI solutions for the past five years. The thing that depresses me the most is not that BI solutions take forever to implement and cost a lot, but that clients many times just don't understand the data they are trying to report on. Many times it leads to over-engineered BI solutions just for one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used. I'm sure more technology focused companies don't have any issues using these self-service models, but you wouldn't believe the innumeracy that some people have in industry.
  • bduerst 11y ago
    Yep. Any exec or manager looking to buy this service as a solution to their reporting needs should sit down and have a serious talk with their analysts or teams who build their reports first. Innumeracy is why the mantra of asking "Why?" instead of "How?" also applies to BI reporting. A flashy new tool or report isn't going to help as much as having a builder with industry knowledge or experience.
    • grantc 11y ago
      They're not mutually exclusive options.
  • saosebastiao 11y ago
    There is an interesting phenomenon that I've noticed about BI: By the time data is appropriately gathered, cleaned, aggregated, and presented, the data is so closely aligned to the decision process that the decisions themselves might as well be automated and optimized. But that never happens. We build reports so that executives can look at them and feel important while they make slower and less optimal decisions than computers could make.
    • etrain 11y ago
      This is the heart and soul of quantitative investment management.
• pjc50 11y ago
  Presumably this is for data that you want graphs of but doesn't fit in Excel?
  • ececconi 11y ago
    When you're working with large companies that process enormous volumes of transactions you can't just download things to excel.
    • jdimov9 11y ago
      You would be shocked and amazed by the kinds of things that Excel is routinely (mis)-used for in business.
    • something123 11y ago
      Surely if you're that large then you could invest in some in-house domain-specific solution. There are whole programming languages dedicated to doing statistics on datasets.
      • slg 11y ago
        Isn't that the whole point of AWS and their competitors? The savings of passing the problem off to domain experts to work out all the details often outweighs the benefits of having a solution that is 100% customized for your business.
      • lotso 11y ago
        For many companies (even large companies) it is cheaper and faster to use a service like this than build an in-house solution.
        • sageabilly 11y ago
          Not to mention that if you want this built for your company you call up the BI provider and tell them to send some consultants over to build it for you. You might train one person or possibly two at the most to be able to make tech calls with the BI provider. Much easier for a company to say "I want a dashboard that reports X, Y, and Z" and then the BI company scurries off, builds it, brings it back to you, and you hand over some cash for their effort.
• solutionyogi 11y ago
  For me, the most interesting part is SPICE. To implement a data warehouse, one creates a star schema (OLAP) database from a regular OLTP database. This involves massive amount of work. It looks like SPICE aims to replace the need for OLAP database and produce similar data directly from OLTP systems. I would love to know more about this engine. I hope Amazon open sources the engine (I highly doubt that they will do it).
  • JPKab 11y ago
    My question is how does SPICE differ from BigQuery? I can connect to BigQuery from Tableau, BIME, Chartio, etc.
    • ickwabe 11y ago
      Not sure about BIME, Chartio. But Tableau certainly connects to Google BigQuery.
      • thingsilearned 11y ago
        Both Chartio and BIME do support BigQuery as well.
    • shrikant 11y ago
      The documentation for QuickSight mentions that Tableau can connect to SPICE as well.
  • baconner 11y ago
    There are a few similar technologies out there some of which are open source. Prestodb comes to mind but there's also some other closed systems like powerbi (with some underlying azure distributed data warehouse bits), etc out there. What's happening in the industry I think is that there was a first wave of data discovery products (tableau being the prime example) that seek to get you right to reporting and data exploration side without necessarily having to slog through all the data warehouse design, and now a second wave like powerbi, etc that are pure saas plays that do something very similar are starting to come out.
• m0th87 11y ago
  We use Chartio at my company. If you haven't tried it yet, this product is stellar - almost all of our BI needs are handled directly by stakeholders rather than having to go through an engineer, and their support is very helpful and responsive. I would consider moving off to something like Quicksight if it supported redis. Some of our BI-related data is stored there, and currently to get at it we have an app that proxies data from there to postgres for Chartio's sake.
  • ticktocktick 11y ago
    It is terrific that your end users are willing to spend the time and effort on building their own BI solutions. In my experience, at least with C-levels, that is not the case at all. C-levels also tend to want the most stuff.
    • jessaustin 11y ago
      I agree, but I must point out that in some cases the alternative to the "time and effort" involved in the exec playing around with a particular end-user report tool is the time and effort involved in a series of meetings attended by the exec and everyone on the chain between the exec and whoever is actually building the reports. If "not able to specify a report format to a software service, even with assistance-as-needed from more technical users" disqualified one from executive employment, would any firm actually be hurt by that?
  • neovintage 11y ago
    Have you tried using Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers? There's a redis fdw that will allow you to use SQL from Postgres and query the keys in Redis. http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/sql-createforeigndatawrapper.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/sql-createforeignd...
    • m0th87 11y ago
      Oh man, that is a very good idea. Apparently Heroku (our pg provider) supports it as well: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-data-links https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-data-links
• ticktocktick 11y ago
  A lot of what you are paying for in BI solutions is implementation costs and then to a lesser extent yearly maintenance and support costs. I wonder how they intend to lower implementation costs, since that is kind of lengthy and inherently difficult process.
• dsjoerg 11y ago
  AWS is the new IBM
• gshx 11y ago
  For one, this: "makes it easy for all employees to.." work with business insights data is usually inaccessible to everyone for a reason.
  • wpietri 11y ago
    Building your business around carefully constructed employee ignorance is a dangerous strategy. It basically assumes that they won't do any useful thinking. That was fine circa 1930, where treating people as dumb pairs of hands was an effective strategy because there was so much manual work to do. But the more we turn rote work over to machines and software, the less this will work.
    • gshx 11y ago
      Agree with your comment wholeheartedly. My comment was mostly around business information flow to the market since that's regulated due to various reasons.
      • wpietri 11y ago
        Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding. Thanks for clarifying.
• buremba 11y ago
  SPICE is definitely the most interesting part of this announcement but there isn't enough information about it.
  • JPKab 11y ago
    SPICE looks to me to be extremely similar to Google BigQuery. I'm very curious about how it differs.
    • buremba 11y ago
      I'm not sure about that because they say that SPICE is an in-memory query engine unlike BigQuery which is a distributed query engine that fetches data from a persistent distributed file-system. It seems to me more like Spark in-memory RDDs that caches data fetched from external data sources. They also support incremental loading similar to Periscope.io which is actually quite cool. I would be great if they could give more information (syntax etc.) about SPICE.
      • dskrvk 11y ago
        > Built from the ground up for the cloud, Amazon QuickSight's Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation Engine ("SPICE") uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations, machine code generation, and data compression to allow users to run interactive queries on large datasets and get rapid responses. The description sounds awfully similar to Spark, yet they say it's "built from the ground up", which I assume means "from scratch".
• blahyawnblah 11y ago
  I really like http://www.manifestinsights.com/ http://www.manifestinsights.com/ for visualizing data.
• brador 11y ago
  I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now. Amazon takes risks, and ships innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push. No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a flash.
  • jrockway 11y ago
    Is this product much different from Google's BigQuery?
    • matsur 11y ago
      BigQuery's AWS analog is Redshift -- this is more akin to Tableau/Mode/Periscope/Chartio etc.
  • gorena 11y ago
    > Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now. As long as you're not one of his employees, sure. If I had a choice between working for Bezos or working for Joel Spolsky at half the pay, it wouldn't even be close. Of course, in real life, Fog Creek probably pays more anyways.
    • brador 11y ago
      Fog creek is nice, but you're working on small localized projects compared to Amazons scale and breadth. Amazon employees are pushed hard, and that's their key to shipping innovation. Look at Googles cuddle farm - Lots of innovation that rarely ships and no risk taking. How about Apple - Constrained innovation, low risk, Once a year shipping. And there's a hundred other CEOs and companies that just don't come close. From an investor standpoint, Bezos is the gold standard of post-IPO CEO. Risk taking, innovation, shipping. The dude's on point. He understands risk taking is the key because returns on hits are 10-1000x your investment. Look at EC2. That can cover the cost of 1000 "firephone" style project failures. But you gotta get it out of R&D and into the market. You need to ship. And he gets that.
• realcul 11y ago
  Looks similar to Power BI. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/features https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/features
  • greggyb 11y ago
    This is the direction most of the major players are trying to go. I thought the same when I saw some of the visuals as well. I'd say Microsoft has the advantage in the enterprise/corporate space. Everyone uses Office already, and Power BI is included for free as add-ons to Excel since 2010. Power BI collaboration portals are also free for the equivalent of Amazon's $9 tier. It's cool to see competition in this space. The real power isn't in building a better BI tool for BI professionals - that's pretty much a solved problem. The problem is capturing and leveraging the business knowledge that lives in Excel spreadsheets or Google spreadsheets on business users' own drives. That's where a lot of this excitement comes in.
  • tyrelb 11y ago
    The Power BI is an incredible product - thanks for listing it here... unreal! Coming from SAP/BusinessObjects products which are generally overweight and expensive, Power BI nails it... Price is free, they offer a download for Windows, web app and appears to have a mobile app. Worth a try. In 5 minutes, I had a dashboard built out of exported data from our accounting system...
    • edwinnathaniel 11y ago
      Have you tried SAP Lumira? http://go.sap.com/product/analytics/lumira/desktop.html http://go.sap.com/product/analytics/lumira/desktop.html Personal Edition is free.
• deleted 11y ago
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• copsarebastards 11y ago
  Currently 6 out of 30 links on HN are Amazon links, 4 of them in the top 5. Looks like someone paid for placement.
  • tlunter 11y ago
    I don't think you understand re:invent. This happens every year.
    • slg 11y ago
      I think a valid question is why these threads aren't being merged like is common practice and happened to a number Microsoft threads during yesterday's event. I'm not sure Hololens has more in common with a Surface Book than Quicksight and Snowball.
      • cthalupa 11y ago
        I would have greatly preferred those threads to not be merged. It's not a particularly good user experience to have a bunch of different unrelated products being discussed under the same article. It's a lot easier for me to just click 'next' and go to page 2 if I'm interested in reading more articles than it is to keep track of what everyone is talking about in a comment section with hundreds of posts and dozens of threads.
    • copsarebastards 11y ago
      Enlighten me on what you think I don't understand.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • tlunter 11y ago
        People are actually genuinely interested in what comes out of re:invent. Because you don't use Amazon's services or don't like the company doesn't mean they paid for placement. They paid a lot of money to developers to develop great things. Why do you have to take that away from them?
• curiousjorge 11y ago
  I'd really hate to be in the same space as amazon.
• sjg007 11y ago
  Amazon is basically eating away at all the big data startups.
• mirkoadari 11y ago
  We're trying out Apache Spark with Apache Zeppelin and it's been a pleasure so far. We faced the same problems that everyone else mentioned here -- data is not accessible to people who need it and every datasource requires different tools. What we like about Apache Spark is that it can take any source and provide the same very fast and programmatic (code reuse!) interface for analysis. Think JSON data dumps from MixPanel, SQL databases, some Excel spreadsheet someone threw together etc. Apache Zeppelin is a little bit limited in the visualization that comes out of the box, but the benefits of having a shared data language across the company is just such a huge plus. Also, super easy to add data visualization options and hopefully companies will start to contribute these back to the project.
• erik-n 11y ago
  >Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (“SPICE”) Now that's a nice acronym! I think Amazon have skilled people in charge of marketing. They make their announcements feel exciting but not too "markety".
  • Jgrubb 11y ago
    On the one hand, you're totally right about the annoucements. On the other hand, the names they give their AWS products are pretty mystifying. AWS Snowball?
    • dhj 11y ago
      AWS Snowball is a play on AWS Glacier. Glacier is the slow moving practically frozen storage system. Snowball takes the same stuff and hurls it rapidly to a destination. Pretty slick.
• simo7 11y ago
  So is SPICE an actual data warehouse or is it more a query engine such as Presto, Hive or Spark?
• jsmeaton 11y ago
  There are so many BI tools around that it's hard to figure out which solution is going to be best for a particular use case. Creating further confusion, it seems like most "enterprise" BI products aren't explained properly on their websites and are hidden behind "request a demo". It's nearly impossible to evaluate all the possibilities without going crazy. I want to be able to generate my domain models in some way. Point and click data descriptions are awful. Letting certain people work with raw data is fine, but a lot of users are going to want to work with names that make sense to them. Let me define models with text, just like ORM models. I want row based security. Let me assign groups to values on certain models. This essentially boils down to hidden filters and required tables. It should all be web based. I'm not exposing my database directly to customers. It should definitely not cost 100k a year. I like the idea of QuickSight, but I can already see that it's not going to work for my needs. But at least they give an upfront description and price. Here's hoping the pricing model drives down the crazy license fees the other vendors are extracting.
  • baconner 11y ago
    I think the big issue with "bi" is that the term is just too broadly applied to be meaningful anymore. Every piece of software with a chart in it somewhere is billed as BI these days and moreover if you ask 10 business users what they want out of their BI system you'll get descriptions of several very different tools which all happen to produce charts. I'm sorry to say I've seen countless businesses deeply disappointed in their BI tools simply because they assumed since "it's a BI tool" it will do X,Y,Z when in reality there are a bunch of different classes of tools to choose from with very different features. The few options that really cover the spectrum are extremely complex and costly to really get value from over the long term. There's a reason why the analyst industry exists - it's just too much damn work to suss out what all these tools actually do on your own. I make BI tools for a living and I am still struggling to really do a great job classifying all these types of functionality and communicating it well enough to lead customers to the tools they really need.
  • aceregen 11y ago
    Hi @jsmeaton, this is Vincent from Holistics (www.holistics.io). While our website also has a "request a demo" button in our landing page - It's because we have just launched and are looking to validate some of the use-cases that we have built. Will really appreciate if you can contact us and share with us your thoughts. Will you mind dropping us a note on our website for us to contact you? It will be interesting to get your feedback, and I suspect what we have built (or are building) may meet some of the things you've listed above, though I still need your validation. A brief introduction about us. We started off as an internal data dashboard for an online video streaming company, serving a specific reporting niche (not a full fledged BI tool) with use-cases different from BI vendors such as Quicksight or the other vendors.
• achille2 11y ago
  Is this just Amiato? Did they acquire them? Edit: Yep, looks like it. Congrats to the Amiato team.