It stores data. A lot of data and now it is available to the masses. Amazon Web Services announced Feb. 15 Amazon Redshift, a data warehouse service in the cloud is now available to customers, according to a press release from Amazon.com.
Amazon Redshift was announced in November at the AWS re: Invent conference, where customers were allowed to use the service given a limited preview, according to the press release.
“From an industry standpoint, this is a great thing. You can download big chunks of data up to Amazon,” said Bill LaPierre, vice president at Datamann. “It’s a place to store data relatively cheap and do solo data on it.”
LaPierre said Amazon Redshift is just a place to store a lot of data, but it doesn’t do anything specific for the merchant. He noted a merchant wouldn’t replace its marketing database, which has all its transactional data, with this platform.
Chris DeMartine, director of business development at Nextmark, said Amazon Redshift going to be big. The question remains of how much of a threat it to its competitors such as Oracle, IBM, Hewlett Packard in terms of the customization if offers.
According to DeMartine, Amazon Redshift is in the cloud, which makes it very easy for people to load and encrypt their data at a lower price point.
“If I had to pay a licensing fee and I don’t get the full value of [the service] I am going to switch to a model that is more attractive to my business based on what I need. That is exactly what they are doing,” said DeMartine.
DeMartine said the biggest impact will be on the top data warehousing companies.
“At a high level, Amazon is leveraging their big data expertise from B2C and going to compete in B2B, that is what is happening here,” said DeMartine. “I think it’s huge, ultimately it’s going to improve the economics for the marketers.”