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SAP Challenges AWS in Cloud Analytics
It didn't take long for competitors to respond to the new cloud-based analytics service -- Amazon QuickSight, announced by Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) last week -- as SAP today unveiled its own similar offering.
The SAP Cloud for Analytics solution is a planned Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering designed to be a one-stop shop for cloud analytics, based on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
"This high-performing, real-time solution plans to be embedded with existing SAP solutions and intends to connect to cloud and on-premise data to deliver planning, predictive and business intelligence (BI) capabilities in one analytics experience," SAP said in a statement today.
The news comes less than a week after AWS announced QuickSight at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. "QuickSight lets users organize, visualize, interact with and share data stored across different AWS sources," Gladys Rama reported from the conference last week on AWS Insider. "The service aims to cut down the time and cost of using traditional on-premises BI solutions to generate reports."
To be embedded in SAP or third-party apps, the SAP product will unify enterprise BI, planning, budgeting and predictive capabilities into one pure cloud service, SAP said, giving business users the ability to work with various kinds of data, of any size, in one place. The company will reveal more at a SAP TechEd conference keynote on Oct. 20.
The AWS offering, meanwhile "features pre-built data visualization templates, the ability to share and collaborate with other users, and native mobile apps for iOS and Android," Rama reported. "QuickSight uses a "super-fast parallel in-memory computation engine," or SPICE, that partners can also leverage to boost their own BI offerings.
"Amazon QuickSight provides partners a simple SQL-like interface to query the data stored in SPICE so that customers can continue using their existing BI tools from AWS BI Partners while benefiting from the faster performance delivered by SPICE," AWS said.
More details on that product are forthcoming also, as AWS has invited interested users to sign up for a preview.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.