SAP, Cognizant, IBM are some of the third party companies which are associated with Amazon's Redshift service. They'll be helping in integrating the product into the companies' wide IT services by providing services on top of it. Two early partners are MicroStrategy and Jaspersoft, as per the company announcement.

Amazon's Redshift is the company's answer to the more expensive counterparts from IBM, HP, Oracle and Teradata. Based on technology from ParAccel, Redshift offers big-time data warehouse services for almost one-tenth of the price of conventional service providers today. The service will allow  Amazon's customers to continue using their analytics tool - MicroStrategy, Jaspersoft or Cognos.

As far as pricing is concerned, Amazon has set the price tags on the greener side - an on-demand XL Node, 2TB storage starts at $0.85 per hour, per Node while a reserved instance, 1 year contract for the same costs $0.215. Meanwhile 8XL Node, 16TB storage is priced at $0.912 for a 3 year period.

The company had recently launched an elastic video transcoding service that allows customers to reformat videos for a number of devices, a service
similar to Zencoder. Amazon is clearly headed towards offering a host of cloud-based enterprise services at much affordable prices. Amazon is, no
doubt, the Walmart of the World Wide Web.

Amazon hasn't revealed any numbers on how Redshift has performed since its soft launch in November last year, as expected. However an official statement from the company does mention "hundreds" of companies moving to Redshift, with customers ranging from startups to big companies in social, gaming, mobile and advertising verticals amongst others.

[Image Source: AWS]