Amazon jumps into market for business-data analysis

Amazon.com rolled out a new service that lets business customers analyze large amounts of data, putting it into the business intelligence market where it will compete with SAP and Microsoft, as well as younger firms such as Tableau.

At the annual conference here for Amazon Web Services, or AWS - Amazon's business that sells computing services to companies over the Internet - the company announced Amazon QuickSight. The service, which will run on AWS, lets business customers dive into the massive amounts of data they are storing on Amazon's servers.

AWS boss Andy Jassy said during his keynote address at the re:Invent conference that QuickSight will cost about a tenth as much at "old-guard" business intelligence software.

At the conference, Amazon also debuted a new piece of hardware - a 47-pound chunky box called Amazon Snowball. Jassy called the box as a "highly secure shippable storage appliance" to help companies move data more quickly than sending it virtually. Each Snowball holds 50 terabytes in a tamper-proof secure enclosure, giving companies the ability to move massive amounts of data quickly.

Amazon will charge $200 per job. And it will wipe and reuse the devices for the next customer.

"It will really help customers who want to move large amounts of data to AWS," Jassy said.

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