Looker (http://www.looker.com), Periscope (http://www.periscope.io), Mode Analytics (http://www.modeanalytics.com), and Chart.io (http://www.chart.io) should probably be even more worried than Tableau.

Co-founder and CTO of Mode here. I'm not too concerned that visual exploration is going to replace SQL for ad-hoc data analysis or data modeling for business intelligence. I think proprietary viz platforms are strictly inferior to open sourced ecosystems like Vega in any case. Open ecosystems win over closed ecosystems in the long-run.

We're more interested in integrating the tools and ecosystems people are already using in novel ways than we are in being yet another dashboard or visualization tool. Dashboards and visualizations are incredibly valuable but they're just one of the many ways that analytics teams deliver value to the organization. There are a lot of "jobs to be done" for an analytics team and the list isn't getting any shorter.

especially when you consider the pricing

And IBM's BI product

Agreed re Tableau being a competitor. But I'm not surprised they're not a partner. Last quote we got from Tableau for desktop was $2k. This comes in at around $200/year. That is probably where the "1/10th of the cost of traditional BI solutions" comes from at the top of the home page.

Tableau are pushing their web system over their desktop tools. It is perfectly possible to use the free reader to consume data without needing hundreds of licences for a cloud product or the full edition.

It's possible, but last time when I used, it's pretty limited. You would need to manually feed local data and re-sync it when it changes. Nothing something you want to do a lot.

Looks like Tableau is a front-end option with AWS QS doing the grunt work of the data handling and digestion.

What is the point of this then? Tableau can directly connect to most of these data sources already. Is this meant as a replacement for a data warehouse to take transactional information into a format that is quicker to report on?

EDIT: After reading into this more it seems like Quicksight is Amazon's version of Tableau and connects to SPICE which is Amazon's version of a data warehouse. If you prefer Tableau, you can apparently connect that directly to SPICE. If you already have Tableau connected to a data warehouse, this would appear to be a new competitor to the market and wouldn't add anything to your specific setup (beyond Amazon's claims that they will do it better).

Tableau offers both desktop and server edition for data visualization. AWS QS also does data visualization but doesn't offer a desktop version. They are competitors. Once Amazon enters a market, game's over. It becomes a race to the bottom red ocean.

The thing about Tableau is that they're really the industry leader in terms of data exploration workflow. Users love the tool so much that they expect any new data system put in place to work with it so even vendors that are trying to put out their own data exploration ui are partnering up with them to provide the best-of-breed sort of option where they can still sell you the data system, but your c-level who will not even consider using anything but Tableau can still use it.

Embrace then exterminate.