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AWS Trails Azure in Cloud BI Survey
Despite its dominant market share, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is only the second most-popular provider of cloud-based business intelligence (BI) services, behind No. 1 Microsoft Azure.
That's according to the "2020 Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence Market Study" published recently by Dresner Advisory Services. For the the 100-page research report (available for purchase here), Dresner researchers polled organizations on their use of, and attitudes toward, cloud-based BI.
Notably, the cloud BI platform that respondents favored the most was Azure. The Microsoft cloud platform's importance was rated "critical" or "very important" by 77 percent of respondents.
This has been one of the few metrics in which Azure has been able to best AWS. Azure's usage base has grown exponentially in recent quarters, outpacing the overall cloud industry, though it still has barely half the market share of perennial market leader AWS.
AWS, for its part, was rated "critical" or "very important" by 66 percent of respondents. In third place was the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with 41 percent of respondents rating it "critical" or "very important."
Rounding out the top five are IBM Bluemix and Alibaba (in that order).
Respondents cited support and access as the primary benefits of cloud-based BI services, and security as a major barrier. Security concerns notwithstanding, however, more organizations than ever are considering cloud-based BI, according to the study.
Cloud-based BI was rated either "critical" or "very important" by 54 percent of respondents -- the highest since the study's first iteration back in 2012. Additionally, a record 72 percent of vendors surveyed called cloud BI "critically important."
"We began tracking interest in and adoption of Cloud BI in 2012, when the market was nascent," said Howard Dresner, founder and chief research officer, in a prepared statement. "Since then we've seen steady growth in deployments of public cloud BI applications, with organizations citing substantial benefits of traditional on-premises implementations. And, with the current Covid-19 pandemic, we expect this to accelerate."