Amazon is mulling a data analytics service for businesses, harnessing the flood of consumer browsing and purchase data to help advertisers serve more relevant ads, according to a news report.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon Web Services is expected to confirm this week that it is launching a new service to help businesses analyse their data.
Code-named Space Needle, the new service will charge customers a monthly subscription fee to store and have their data presented to them.
It will be designed to inform business decisions and improve businesses efficiency by drawing on an array of databases and present relationships between them in graph form.
It will also use the data to simulate different scenarios allowing businesses to see how to allocate resources to making it easier for the user to generate maximum revenue.
According to reports from the WSJ, it will include a faster method for transferring or copying data to AWS. In instances where the amount of data is too large, Amazon will supply a storage device that customers can transfer the data onto and send back.
Large companies like Adobe, Airbnb, NASA, Dow Jones and Netflix are already using AWS, so Amazon could start with a strong client base.
Sources familiar with the matter seem to have confirmed to WSJ but Amazon declined to respond.
However, the WSJ report points out, tools like these are only as good as the data that is being fed into it. Connecting and feeding that data which is not stored or hosted on the AWS systems will pose a big challenge in the overall uptake and proliferation of this service.
Business intelligence programmes are springing up fast with the promise of delivering big on data and Amazon’s entry into the market will see it go head-to-head with the likes of IBM and Microsoft.
Corporate data is expected to play a larger role in business strategies as more business is conducted online and the cost of data storage falls.
According to analyst Pringle & Co, the business intelligence market is expected to be worth $143bn by 2016.