At the Amazon Web Services re: Invent conference today, all the buzz was about a move by Amazon to create a data warehouse in the cloud, dubbed Redshift, that promises to manage petabytes of data at a fraction of the cost of an on-premise system. Hoping to take advantage of that Redshift service, Jaspersoft announced that its business intelligence software running on top of AWS is now integrated with Redshift.
According to Karl Van den Bergh, vice president of products and alliance for Jaspersoft, Redshift represents nothing less than the democratization of data warehouses. That obviously benefits Jaspersoft in that the easier it is to aggregate large amounts of the data, the more call there is for business intelligence applications. By running Jaspersoft software on AWS, Van den Bergh says Jaspersoft hopes to become the natural BI application that will be used on thousands of AWS customers that will soon be using Redshift.
While Redshift is still in beta, Van den Bergh says the whole goal of BI should be to surface insight within the context of another application. As that begins to happen more commonly in the cloud, not only does usage of BI software increase, so too does its value to the business.
On the one hand, data virtualization technologies are making it possible to analyze data without having to move it at all. At the same time, however, Van den Bergh says data virtualization technologies don’t scale to handle terabytes and petabytes of data. As such, it’s going to be a lot more efficient for applications running in the cloud to expose data in a data warehouse that runs on the same cloud as the application.
The degree to which services such as Redshift result in a wholesale shift away from running data warehouses on premise remains to be seen. But there is no doubt that many of the providers of applications running on AWS will likely find Redshift to be the path of least resistance when it comes to building BI applications on top of a data warehouse that shares the same cloud infrastructure.
