Towards the end of Wednesday’s live broadcast of theCUBE at the AWS re:Invent 2013 conference, hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante welcomed Paul Lilford, the Channel Director for Technology Partners with Tableau Software.

Furrier commented on how the conference seemed to be highly focused on attracting the developer and Lilford’s presence at the conference spoke to that. With more and more businesses moving their data into the cloud, a visualization tool like Tableau offers is an effective way to communicate Big Data. And Tableau is working with Amazon on this front.

“Tableau considers Amazon a very strategic partner,” Lilford said. “The cloud’s role in Big Data is undeniable. It’s the agility. It’s the cost. It’s all of that movement in it. When I look at cloud and Big Data in general, I think there is a growing role and an ever-growing role to keep it agile.”

The cost model behind cloud adoption is key to future innovation in an enterprise. Funding not put to on-prem hardware and software can be reinvested into the company. And as Lilford and many others attending the conference have commented, this low-cost, highly agile model allows developers to try out ideas. Damage from failure is mitigated because that failure is both small and fast. This was not possible previously.

Speaking to the mentality of enterprise leaders, Furrier pointed out the prevailing thought is ‘what have you done for me lately?’ The environment is all about speed. It is the marriage of Big Data to visualization that plays nicely into that speed game.

And then Furrier asked, “Why is the cloud so hot with Amazon? Is it the apps driving it? Companies wanting speed with value?”

“There are a couple of things there,” stated Lilford. “One, the cost of infrastructure is a challenge. Amazon costpoint is a beautiful costpoint for enterprise customers. And two, if you’re testing out and you don’t know the analytic that you are going to perform, you really want a test ground for that and I think the cloud is one of the best options. Spinning up infrastructure internally to do that is a very 90’s way to do it. We’ve moved beyond that.”

Continuing he said, “I think our customers are getting more and more comfortable with the idea that the cloud can be secure. The cloud can be a place where you do real work. I think that part of it is also fairly significant. The beauty of the cloud is, at least from a Tableau perspective, the business user doesn’t have to worry about the complexity of the infrastructure at all.”

Once a business user has committed to the cloud, the next challenge, says Lilford, is governing how your data is input. But once that has been decided, the ease of use allows you to “just go and work and do the analytics.”

Vellante asked Lilford to go into some detail about the role of the cloud as a disruptor in the market and as an opportunity for the end-user.

“[Tableau] released online earlier this year and it’s our hosted cloud version. We didn’t do it to replace on-prem and we don’t believe cloud truly replaces on-prem. It’s a complement to it. And it’s part of the Big Data continuum. It’s the ability to cycle through and when you find things that work either put them in play on-prem or in the cloud depending on your choice.

“But for Tableau, it was just an undeniable piece that we had to get into. Our customers demanded it of us. We are going to maintain a very strong on-prem delivery.”

He sees a future with Amazon to include tighter integration with more packaged solutions with their partners. He believes Tableau has to take full advantage that this is now an e-world and people are more comfortable now with working in the cloud.