Amazon QuickSight - a new BI platform from amazon (and some related stuff that jumped to my mind while reading about it)
It was last year that one of the hottest trend for BI was Elasticsearch + Kibana.
A great Database with a great visualization tool on top of it. Pretty close to what Splunk does.
You could hear everywhere things like "you just throw inside all of your data and can query and visualize it in any way you wish".
Managers went after that as they were hypnotized. It was revolutionary.
But it didn't last long. People started to get that it is cool and nice to get your data sliced and diced so fast and in such beautiful graphs, but in many cases it was only nice to have.
Amazon announced QuickSight last month - https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/
For me it is a super cheap, easy and elegant way to implement that model of Elasticsearch + Kibana, in case that you are already on AWS.
I don't see that as a revolution, but as another classic case of platform that gets migrated to the cloud, which is quite a lot and enabler for businesses that can't develop these kind of platforms by themselves.
I also have problem with that name. Insights are result of data model, relations, and semantics that you give your data. You can throw the best ingredients to the best cooking pot and boil it, but it won't get tasty by itself. Some ingredients require special treatment, some are only go with others, some are not for boiling at all, but for baking.
In general, there is no one solution for BI, and that's why platforms as Hadoop and S3 are so important for business. They are actually a supermarket of data, as my friend Evgeni says. Data analysts can then become chefs and cook their own desired and tasty meal, and Amazon quick insight just another recipe.
Still, I believe that customers that are considering moving to AWS, would get a lot from quick sight. It is one of the worthwhile amazon services to get familiar with because it is more than just a db. It is a while solutions that customers might really really like.
And correct me if I am wrong :)
