Bigger, Cheaper, Faster Data in the Cloud - The New York Times

"Democratized BI" at cloud scale

"Civis does not claim to be breaking new ground in data science. Instead, the company says it can automate a lot of expensive processes in large scale pattern-finding. When the team was working for Mr. Obama it used regular computers, and the problems increased as the amount of data it had grew. Cloud computing better handles such growth.

The company’s selling point is in adapting the services to generalized cloud tools, in particular the AWS Redshift data analysis service, to handle big analysis tasks with little of the customization otherwise required."

Bigger, Cheaper, Faster Data in the Cloud - The New York Times