The buzz at Amazon Inc.’s annual re:Invent cloud conference last week spilled over into the analytics world following the introduction of a new business intelligence service promising to simplify the visualization of data stored on its platform. The aptly-named QuickSight comes with the usual promises of better pricing and easier setup compared to traditional on-premise tools. .

However, the main target in the company’s sights are not legacy vendors but rather the new-generation dashboarding providers that also deliver their services via the public cloud, often its own platform. Further complicated their situation is the fact that many of the biggest alternatives to Amazon’s cloud have their native business intelligence capabilities as well.

The most notable of the bunch is Microsoft Corp. with its recently launched Power BI, which not coincidentally received an update of its own against the backdrop of re:Invent. The software giant is now offering analysts the ability to push their data directly to the service for visualization without having to manually import the relevant files, which can become quite tiresome when it comes to advanced models that require a great deal of information.

The addition is made possible through newly announced integration with Alteryx Inc.’s namesake data blending software. Redmond’s endorsement represents a major milestone for the Irvine-based startup and an equally notable event to Google Inc., the third biggest name in the public cloud, which simply couldn’t let two product launches from its biggest rivals pass unanswered.

The company fired back with the release of a security service that can analyze a web application deployed on its infrastructure-as-a-service platform for vulnerabilities that a hacker might be able to exploit. The scanner takes the straightforward but effective approach of simulating various common attack types and malicious input against the workload to test its resilience from different angles. 

Image via geralt