
Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS - polmolea
https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/
======
ececconi
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.

~~~
wpietri
> one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used.

My dad started developing software in the late 60s. As a kid (let's say circa
1982, definitely in the minicomputer era), I remember him talking about a
problem at work: to do all their daily processing, they needed about 28 hours.
A lot of the workload was reporting, so he asked managers what reports were no
longer useful. Naturally, he was assured that every report was absolutely
vital to proper functioning.

His solution was just to start dropping reports. If anybody complained, he'd
put them back in the job list. A significant number of reports went
unlamented, and soon the computer was able to complete its daily workload
handily.

The lesson I took from this is that expressed desire is often very different
than actual need, so separating the two can pay big dividends. I've never used
that trick, but the lesson runs all through my methods.

~~~
lazaroclapp
Well, the only issue I can see with that now a days is if one such report is
actually needed _only_ for compliance purposes. Then, five years down the
line, an audit happens and 1825 copies of that required daily report happen to
be missing...

~~~
dexterdog
Well at least they didn't worry about the report on leap days.

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vkb
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
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
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.

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m0th87
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
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
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?

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jsmeaton
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
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.

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mirkoadari
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.

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solutionyogi
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
My question is how does SPICE differ from BigQuery? I can connect to BigQuery
from Tableau, BIME, Chartio, etc.

~~~
ickwabe
Not sure about BIME, Chartio. But Tableau certainly connects to Google
BigQuery.

~~~
thingsilearned
Both Chartio and BIME do support BigQuery as well.

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brador
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.

~~~
astazangasta
One of the most destructive aspects of the mythology of modern tech culture is
this ridiculous worship of CEOs, as if they are supermen and the thousands of
creative people who actually build the products we enjoy are just the gloves
these heroes wear. Stop doing this. You're devaluing the worth of everyone
here.

~~~
nugget
One manager's decision can make the work of hundreds of people worthless or
even destructive. I've lived thru and seen it. Like it or not the shot callers
at the top wield enormous influence and the ones who make consistently good
decisions should be celebrated for that.

~~~
jazzyk
You are right - one bad decision can destroy a project/product.

But the opposite is not necessarily true. To ship insanely great things, you
need a lot of factors to come together, not just one person's decision
(although it helps).

Steve Jobs kept using ideas from the people who worked from him (presenting
them later as his ideas). Yes, he had great intuition and good taste to choose
the better ideas, but without the people who generated these ideas, he would
have been yet another arrogant, loudmouth suit.

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andrewstuart2
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.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
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
My god I would be thrilled if there could just be a usable S3 filesystem
browser.

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ticktocktick
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.

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realcul
Looks similar to Power BI. [https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-
us/features](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/features)

~~~
tyrelb
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
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.

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nostromo
At first glance, this seems like a Tableau competitor. So I'm surprised to see
Tableau listed as a partner.

~~~
liscovich
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.

~~~
besquared
Co-founder and CTO of Mode here. I'm not too concerned that visual exploration
is going to replace SQL for ad-hoc data analysis or data modeling for business
intelligence. I think proprietary viz platforms are strictly inferior to open
sourced ecosystems like Vega in any case. Open ecosystems win over closed
ecosystems in the long-run.

We're more interested in integrating the tools and ecosystems people are
already using in novel ways than we are in being yet another dashboard or
visualization tool. Dashboards and visualizations are incredibly valuable but
they're just one of the many ways that analytics teams deliver value to the
organization. There are a lot of "jobs to be done" for an analytics team and
the list isn't getting any shorter.

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buremba
SPICE is definitely the most interesting part of this announcement but there
isn't enough information about it.

~~~
JPKab
SPICE looks to me to be extremely similar to Google BigQuery. I'm very curious
about how it differs.

~~~
buremba
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
> 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".

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dsjoerg
AWS is the new IBM

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tidon12
Seems like a cool way to further increase the "stickiness" of AWS

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simo7
So is SPICE an actual data warehouse or is it more a query engine such as
Presto, Hive or Spark?

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erik-n
>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
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
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.

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pjc50
Presumably this is for data that you want graphs of but doesn't fit in Excel?

~~~
ececconi
When you're working with large companies that process enormous volumes of
transactions you can't just download things to excel.

~~~
something123
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.

~~~
lotso
For many companies (even large companies) it is cheaper and faster to use a
service like this than build an in-house solution.

~~~
sageabilly
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.

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sjg007
Amazon is basically eating away at all the big data startups.

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gshx
For one, this: "makes it easy for all employees to.." work with business
insights data is usually inaccessible to everyone for a reason.

~~~
wpietri
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
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
Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding. Thanks for clarifying.

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achille2
Is this just Amiato? Did they acquire them?

Edit: Yep, looks like it. Congrats to the Amiato team.

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curiousjorge
I'd really hate to be in the same space as amazon.

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blahyawnblah
I really like
[http://www.manifestinsights.com/](http://www.manifestinsights.com/) for
visualizing data.

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smileysteve
They mention integration with RDS, which is kind of scary considering the data
a lot of databases hold.

