Ditching Traditional BI Tools for Amazon QuickSight

In today's data-driven world, there is an urgency for businesses to adapt and innovate in the realm of data analytics in order to meet the growing demands for customer insights. In fact, a few years ago, an IDC report highlighted that a significant portion—52%—of businesses were expected to replace their Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics solutions within the next 24 months. Even in 2024, we continue to witness this trend among our current customers. Keep reading to discover why transitioning from traditional BI Tools to Amazon QuickSight is crucial.

Meeting the Data Demands

Company products or applications aren’t slowing down in generating data but are doing so at a faster pace. And with the rise of AI and GenAI, how are businesses supposed to keep up? Owners of these applications not only want to differentiate their business products from their competitors but also want to gain valuable insights from the data to improve experiences for their end users— whether those are internal teams/departments or external customers. For example, internal teams may want to be able to analyze customer data and use it to make informed decisions on the business's future.

The Challenge of Traditional BI Solutions

To rely on meaningful insights from data, organizations need to rely on Business Intelligence or BI tools. However, with traditional BI tools, data resides in a disparate system and requires a data engineering team to connect and provide continuous integration. Companies using traditional BI tools tend to find themselves: 

1. Building/Maintaining their own dedicated infrastructure and engineering teams that are resource-intensive, expensive, and time-consuming.

2. Using a solution that is server-based, cannot scale, and is restrictive. Businesses still need to do capacity planning, and designing for high availability often doubles the cost. Consequently, businesses may roll insights out to only a small subset of their key customers rather than fully democratizing access.

And with either case mentioned above, businesses then have to integrate between their application and a BI tool, which is not a great user experience, not to mention time-consuming! Instead, it would be a much more positive experience to embed Insights within the existing application itself. 

Why Amazon QuickSight?

So, why use QuickSight instead of building your own BI solution or incorporating a traditional BI tool? QuickSight lets you quickly embed interactive dashboards and visualizations into your applications without needing to build your analytics capabilities.  

Key advantages of QuickSight include: 

1. Scalability: QuickSight automatically scales to meet the demands of tens to hundreds of thousands of users, eliminating the need for manual server management.
2. Ease of Integration: With robust APIs and SDKs, QuickSight enables seamless integration into existing applications, allowing for customization and flexibility tailored to user needs.
3. Advanced Analytics: Leveraging machine learning and AI capabilities such as anomaly detection and natural language queries, QuickSight equips users with powerful tools to derive deeper insights from their data.
4. Security and Compliance: QuickSight provides native connectors to AWS services and granular access control features, ensuring data security and compliance with regulatory requirements.

Our Experience

We've used Amazon QuickSight for many clients, including our own SaaS product, SchoolTool, a student management system designed for New York State schools. SchoolTool's dashboards help educators analyze student data for better outcomes. 

Previously, our legacy SchoolTool dashboards needed frequent updates, had an outdated interface, and relied heavily on a dedicated development team. Amazon QuickSight changed this. Now, we don't need a dedicated development team to write custom JavaScript code for updates. Changes can be made quickly (3x faster!) instead of taking months. This streamlined process has improved our operations and empowered educators with real-time insights to improve student outcomes.

Read more about the SchoolTool Dashboard story by visiting our latest case study.

How can I get started with Amazon QuickSight? 

To kickstart your journey with Amazon QuickSight, the initial step is to sign up for a Data Architected Review. This review enables your team to collaborate with a Certified AWS Data Architect, diving into the three core pillars of your data pipeline: Data Ingestion, Data Storage, and Analytics (AI/ML, Business Intelligence). 

During this collaborative process, we'll work together to identify your challenges and opportunities, laying the groundwork for a robust data strategy to help you achieve your goals—leveraging your data to make informed decisions.