AWS Announces Five New Capabilities for Amazon QuickSight

New capabilities in Amazon QuickSight Q enable customers to forecast and to ask “why” questions

Automated data preparation makes it faster for customers to start asking questions of their data using Amazon QuickSight Q

New paginated reporting feature makes it easy for customers to create and share business-critical operational reports using the familiar Amazon QuickSight interface

Amazon QuickSight’s in-memory engine now supports 1 billion rows of data, making it easier and faster to analyze and visualize large datasets

Customers can now programmatically create, manage, and edit Amazon QuickSight dashboards and reports to accelerate migrations from legacy systems

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced five new capabilities to help customers streamline business intelligence (BI) operations using Amazon QuickSight, the most popular serverless BI service built for the cloud. Today’s announcement expands QuickSight Q, a natural language querying capability, to support forecast and “why” questions and automate data preparation, making it easier and faster to start asking questions in natural language. Additionally, customers can now create and share paginated reports alongside interactive dashboards, quickly analyze and visualize billion-row datasets directly in QuickSight, and programmatically create and manage BI assets to accelerate migration from legacy systems. The new features announced today, combined with QuickSight’s scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing, enable customers to let users understand, visualize, and derive insights and predictions from data, regardless of technical expertise. To get started with QuickSight, visit aws.amazon.com/quicksight.

“Organizations today are composed of numerous stakeholders with varying levels of technical expertise—all of whom need access to critical business insights to make better decisions and share knowledge,” said G2 Krishnamoorthy, vice president of Analytics at AWS. “That is why more than 100,000 customers use QuickSight to power their BI needs. Today’s announcement makes QuickSight even more intuitive, flexible, and accessible while streamlining BI operations with a comprehensive and fast service built for the cloud. Whether users want to forecast sales using natural language queries, distribute critical operational reports, embed analytics in high-traffic websites, or visually analyze massive datasets, we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers by providing advanced BI capabilities that support data-driven decisions at scale.”

Companies today gather unprecedented amounts of data that they want to use to make informed decisions, spot business trends, and increase efficiency. To help employees turn data into action, organizations must make this data accessible to a broad audience in formats ranging from natural language querying and paginated reports to interactive dashboards and embedded analytics. Amazon QuickSight, the most popular serverless BI service built for the cloud, makes this possible for customers including 3M, Best Western, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Capital One, Comcast, Experian, Guardian Life, McDonald’s, the National Football League, NTT DOCOMO, Siemens, and United Airlines. QuickSight has added more than 80 capabilities in the past year alone, making it easier for customers to deliver valuable business insights throughout their organizations, when and where needed. Today’s announcement builds on these advances to help customers migrate and consolidate their BI initiatives in the cloud.

• Support for forecast and "why" questions in Amazon QuickSight Q: QuickSight Q uses machine learning to enable any user to ask questions about business data in natural language and receive accurate answers with relevant visualizations in seconds. QuickSight Q lets anyone explore historical trends and metrics without technical expertise, allowing users to derive new insights from the data that powers their dashboards and reports. For example, a sales user could ask, “Where did we sell the most items last year?” or a finance user could ask, “What is actual revenue compared to goal?” Many users want to dig even deeper to understand the underlying causes of different metrics or to model potential growth. With the new capabilities in QuickSight Q, business users can now ask forecast questions to project metrics if historical patterns hold and also ask "why" questions to see what historical data contributed to specific results. For example, a sales manager might ask to "Forecast sales for office chairs in California." QuickSight Q will provide a forecast of sales based on patterns of previous metrics that automatically account for seasonality and anomalous data. The sales manager might then ask, "Why did sales increase last month?" Within seconds, QuickSight Q summarizes the key drivers of that increase. That means business users can better understand underlying factors, and they can make more data-driven decisions that determine future outcomes. Support for forecast and “why” questions is available at no additional cost to all QuickSight Q customers.
• Automated data preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q: A new capability in QuickSight Q automatically infers and adds semantic information to datasets, reducing the time BI teams spend prepping data for natural language querying from days to minutes. To prepare data for natural language queries, BI teams today must manually translate shorthand representations and abbreviations optimized for BI dashboards or SQL queries into commonly used business terms (e.g., cust_ID translates to Customer ID). The automated data preparation feature in QuickSight Q uses pretrained machine learning models and learnings from a customer’s existing assets (e.g., dashboards and reports) to preconfigure business terms in each new dataset in minutes, reducing the time it takes to start querying data. For example, a streaming service could use the QuickSight Q automated data preparation capability to preconfigure business terms for a dataset by using a preexisting dashboard that includes subscriber information by customer categories, customer IDs, and geographic locations. If a marketing manager is planning a launch campaign, they can ask, "How many premium subscribers do we have in Los Angeles?" and QuickSight Q will return precise results. Automated data preparation is available at no additional cost to all QuickSight Q customers.
• Paginated reporting built for the cloud: Paginated reports provide a formatted, printable summary of data that organizations can use to broadly share critical operational information like daily transaction summaries and weekly updates with business users (e.g., executives, managers, and front-line workers). While many organizations have adopted modern BI products, those tools lack the ability to create and share paginated reports. This means customers often maintain multiple systems—one for modern BI needs and a separate legacy system for paginated reports. These on-premises systems can cost millions of dollars in infrastructure, have rigid license fees, and require dedicated resources to maintain, including replicating datasets across both systems. With Amazon QuickSight Paginated Reports, customers can now create, consume, and manage paginated reports in the cloud with the familiar QuickSight interface, eliminating the costs and complexity of a separate on-premises system. BI teams can use QuickSight’s point-and-click dashboard and report-authoring interface to create and publish reports in minutes, without learning a new tool or managing any infrastructure. Business users can access the reports alongside their interactive dashboards directly in QuickSight. QuickSight Paginated Reports is available as an add-on to all QuickSight Enterprise Edition customers.
• Simple and fast analysis for large datasets: Amazon QuickSight’s Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation Engine (SPICE) provides lightning-fast performance at scale, handling more than 100 million queries every week and processing an average of tens of trillions of records per hour. Today, SPICE enables thousands of users in an organization to perform fast, interactive analyses simultaneously without any infrastructure setup or management. While SPICE supports datasets of up to 500 million rows, customers who want to use QuickSight's rich visualizations to explore even larger datasets have previously had to rely on data engineers to manually orchestrate data between QuickSight and another data store (e.g., Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, or another data warehouse), which made it challenging to access and analyze very large datasets quickly. With billion-row support in SPICE, it’s easier to connect to data stores and ingest data into SPICE. Users now have greater autonomy to visually analyze large datasets directly in QuickSight, without coordinating with engineering teams to manually orchestrate data among services. Support for billion-row datasets is now available to all QuickSight Enterprise Edition customers.
• Faster, programmatic migration to the cloud: QuickSight’s expanded application programming interface (API) capabilities now allow customers to create, manage, and edit their BI assets (e.g., dashboards, analysis, and reports) programmatically, helping accelerate and streamline migrations from on-premises legacy systems. Today’s BI tools lack full programmatic access to dashboards and reports, significantly complicating migration to a cloud-based BI offering. To move to the cloud, customers might need to re-create tens of thousands of dashboards and reports from scratch, which could take years. This barrier prevents many businesses from migrating away from legacy systems. API-based access to the underlying data models of dashboards and reports allows customers and partners to treat these assets like software source code, enabling fully programmatic deployments, peer code reviews, and auditability of all changes. Programmatic access to dashboards is available to all QuickSight Enterprise Edition customers at no additional cost.

Nasdaq is a global technology company serving the capital markets and other industries. “QuickSight Q has been a game changer in enabling executives, sales, and data engineering teams to get answers from data instantaneously. In many scenarios, our teams want to go beyond historical trends or current data snapshots to understand why something happened and forecast trends,” said Michael Weiss, product manager at Nasdaq North American Markets. “QuickSight Q’s new ‘why’ feature will help our users understand the top dimensions and values that contributed most to changes in key metrics, while forecasting will help our users explore forward-looking insights like future revenue and market share growth across market segments and customers. These new capabilities in QuickSight Q will help us accelerate BI adoption by fully automating complex data analyses and helping end users self-serve without the need for analyst-built models and analyses.”

Siemens is a global leader in electrification, automation, and digitalization. “At Siemens we power some of the largest manufacturing organizations in the world with our software-as-a-service solutions. Operational reporting has been a key requirement to ensure all of our customers receive detailed visibility into their organizational activities. While we have tried different solutions over the years, we consistently face challenges with reliability, stability, and ease-of-use,” said Massimilliano Ponticelli, product manager at Siemens. “We are excited that QuickSight now has paginated reporting capabilities built in, so we can use a single interface for both interactive dashboards and operational reports. This will help us further streamline our operations and ensure our customers have full visibility into every aspect of their business.”

Capital One is a leading financial institution specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts. “Many of our teams across all our lines of business rely on QuickSight to ensure users can access timely insights to make data-driven decisions, whether directly in QuickSight or embedded in line-of-business applications,” said Latha Govada, director of Enterprise Data Consumption Platforms at Capital One. “We are excited about QuickSight Paginated Reports, as it will give our users a greater choice of how they consume the data they need, without having to use a separate product. The ability to programmatically create and manage dashboards will also allow us to further automate and strengthen our BI operations. We love the pace of QuickSight innovation, which lets our teams be more agile with every release.”

Best Western Hotels & Resorts is an award-winning global family of hotels located in nearly 100 countries and territories that offers accommodations for all types of travelers. “We are a large and complex organization with 18 brands and varied ownership structures across geographies. Moving to QuickSight from legacy BI has helped us expand to over 23,000 users and reduce our costs by 30%. With QuickSight, we were able to consolidate multiple BI solutions and data sources to enable faster, more holistic insights,” said Joseph Landucci, director of Technology Management at Best Western. “The expansion of QuickSight’s SPICE capability to accommodate billion row datasets will provide us with continued performance at scale across a wide range of use cases, including marketing statistics, advance booking patterns, daily occupancy rates, and loyalty program information. Additionally, QuickSight Paginated Reports will allow us to bring to the fold users who prefer to have highly-formatted reports shared directly with them when needed, helping further our mission to democratize data across our organization.”

NISSAN is an international automotive company which sells vehicles under the Nissan, Infiniti, and Datsun brands. “As we scale the use of dashboards and reports to share data-driven insights on connected car data across our organization, it is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on the time-consuming and error-prone process of manually deploying BI assets,” said Daisuke Hyodo, deputy general manager of Research and Development, Data Science, and Global IT at NISSAN. “As an agile data and analytics team, we are excited to use QuickSight’s expanded API capabilities to programmatically manage analyses and dashboard assets in our DevOps pipeline. This will allow us to promote changes faster and quickly share valuable insights with our end users.”

Traeger Grills is a leading provider of smokers, grills, and barbeque products. “Our operations team uses QuickSight to deliver fast, accurate information and solutions to our customers and partners. It has helped us realize a 90% reduction in our BI costs while serving over 700 users across a variety of use cases, from distribution center forecasts to reporting Amazon Connect call center metrics. It has also allowed us to enable augmented self-service by allowing users to ask questions in natural language directly in QuickSight Q without having to wait for an analyst, and to ensure consistent high performance with QuickSight's SPICE data engine,” said Corey Savory-Venzke, vice president of Customer Experience at Traeger. “We are excited about the new forecast and ‘why’ capabilities in QuickSight Q, which will help our users gain a deeper understanding of their data. As our usage and datasets grow, SPICE's ability to handle 1 billion row datasets will also be critical in ensuring consistent high-performance for all our users.”

Anthology provides a holistic ecosystem of EdTech solutions for over 150 million learners, educators, and administrators in over 80 countries. “Sharing business insights from across our EdTech platform is a critical part of our mission to provide dynamic, data-informed experiences to the global education community. While almost everyone would benefit from these insights, not everyone wants to fetch information from a dashboard,” said Steve Bailey, director of Product Management, Data, and Analytics at Anthology. “We are excited about QuickSight Paginated Reports, which will help our end-users access business-critical insights in a consumable format delivered directly to them, while also making it significantly easier for our developers to create and schedule reports in minutes using the familiar QuickSight interface.”

Showpad is a sales enablement platform helping B2B sales teams globally maximize impact. “At Showpad, we embed QuickSight dashboards within our customer facing applications to improve sales and marketing effectiveness. We've also introduced QuickSight Q so users can ask business questions that go beyond existing dashboards. As a fully SaaS based product, we continuously deliver product updates to our customers following DevOps practices,” said Jeroen Minnaert, head of Data at Showpad. “We are excited to use QuickSight’s expanded API capabilities to allow programmatic creation and management of dashboards. This will allow us to treat QuickSight assets as software components and promote our analyses and dashboards automatically from development to staging to production even faster than before. The introduction of forecast and ‘why’ questions in QuickSight Q will help us further enhance customer value by enabling users to uncover key contributors to changes in the metrics that matter and forecast adoption without the need for technical analysts.”

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