Accelerating Your Migration to Amazon Quick: Transforming Legacy BI into AI-Powered Insights
The Real Cost of Staying on Legacy BI
How It Works: A Two-Step, Chat-Based Migration
Architecture Overview
Your Migration Journey
Step 1: Complete the Prerequisites on Your Source BI
Step 2: Set Up AWS Transform and Subscribe Through AWS Marketplace
Step 3: Analyze Your BI Dashboards
Step 4: Convert Your BI Dashboards
After Migration: From Converted to Production-Ready
For Quick Admin: Assign Ownership and Configure Governance
For Quick Authors: Validate and Accept
Publish and Go Live
Get Started
About the Authors
Accelerating Your Migration to Amazon QuickSight: A Step-by-Step Guide
Migrating to Amazon QuickSight doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Your dashboards encode hard-won domain knowledge, from calculated fields perfected by analysts to layouts relied upon by executives every Monday morning. While the allure of AI-powered insights and serverless scale is undeniable, facing hundreds of dashboards, with migration timelines measured in months, can be daunting. Fortunately, there’s a way to significantly accelerate your journey to Amazon QuickSight, potentially reducing timelines from months to mere days.
In this post, we’ll walk you through the complete journey—from setting up your migration workspace in AWS Transform and subscribing to partner agents via the AWS Marketplace, to unlocking Amazon QuickSight capabilities that fundamentally change how your organization consumes data.
The Real Cost of Staying on Legacy BI
If you’re still running legacy BI tools, the pressures are mounting beyond just the licensing fees:
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Infrastructure Versus Insights: You’re spending precious time on servers instead of analytics. Tasks like patching, scaling, and monitoring take attention away from the insights work that drives business value. With Amazon QuickSight, you have a serverless, fully managed solution—no capacity planning or maintenance windows required.
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Custom Engineering for AI: Traditional BI tools often require extensive custom engineering to harness AI capabilities. Amazon QuickSight includes native AI features, enabling your teams to pose business questions in natural language and automate workflows directly from dashboards.
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Slow Response Times: Analysts face long wait times for answers due to provisioning capacity, managing extracts, and troubleshooting performance. The QuickSight SPICE in-memory engine provides sub-second query performance at scale, while its embedded analytics APIs allow dashboard publishing directly into your applications.
The case for modernization is compelling, but the question remains: how to transition without losing what already works? To learn more about Amazon QuickSight’s offerings, explore the Getting Started with Amazon QuickSight guide.
Accelerating BI Migration with AWS Transform
AWS Transform is an AI-powered service designed to accelerate enterprise modernization, now extending its capabilities to BI migration. Organizations use AWS Transform to modernize various workloads, from mainframes to Windows environments. Now, you can leverage it for BI migration, thanks to partnerships with experts like Wavicle Data Solutions, which integrates EZConvertBI agents for swift Tableau and Power BI migration.
How It Works: A Two-Step, Chat-Based Migration
In AWS Transform, you create a workspace and launch migration jobs through a user-friendly conversational interface. Wavicle provides four specialized agents available in the AWS Marketplace: one Analyzer agent and one Converter agent for each BI migration source (Power BI and Tableau).
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Analyze Phase: The analyzer agent connects to your existing BI environment, extracting metadata and cataloging dashboards, datasets, calculations, and dependencies. It generates a migration readiness assessment, including a compatibility report to highlight what will convert smoothly and what needs attention.
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Convert Phase: Choose the dashboards to migrate and initiate a conversion job. The Converter agent rebuilds assets in Amazon QuickSight—datasets, calculated fields, visualizations, charts, filters, and more—preserving the analytical logic developed over years in your original BI tool.
Using Amazon Bedrock, the underlying AI capabilities facilitate migration automation while Wavicle’s extensive migration expertise is encoded in the agent logic, streamlining the entire process.
Architecture Overview
The solution is built upon AWS-native services:
- AWS Transform: Acts as a collaborative enterprise IT transformation workbench, powered by expert agents and continuous learning to streamline cloud migration and app modernization.
- Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: A secure runtime environment for managing agent execution, credential storage, and access control.
- Amazon QuickSight: The destination BI service with inherently serverless scalability and remarkable performance through its SPICE engine.
- Amazon S3: This service stores validation reports and migration artifacts for audit and review purposes.
Your Migration Journey
Here’s a brief overview of the experience from selection to migrated dashboards in Amazon QuickSight:
Step 1: Prepare Your Source BI
Before running your first migration, ensure the source BI tool is ready:
- For Power BI: Set up workspace access and service principal authentication.
- For Tableau: Enable the Metadata API and generate a Personal Access Token (PAT) for authenticated API access.
Step 2: Set Up AWS Transform and Subscribe
Utilize this interactive demo to establish your orchestration layer. AWS Transform automates assessments, dependency mapping, and transformation planning—all in a shared workspace, tracking progress collaboratively.
Step 3: Analyze Your BI Dashboards
Use the Power BI Analyzer agent or Tableau Analyzer agent demo to generate a comprehensive analysis report that captures dashboard complexity and helps define your migration execution plan.
Step 4: Convert Your BI Dashboards
Follow the steps in the Power BI or Tableau Converter agent demo. The Converter agent duplicates your selected dashboards, maintaining datasets, calculated fields, visualizations, and more, while you monitor progress within the AWS Transform chat interface.
After Migration: From Converted to Production-Ready
Once migration is complete, the QuickSight datasets, analyses, and calculated fields are handed off to your team. The subsequent steps—governance, validation, and publishing—are critical to maintaining quality and accountability.
Configuration Steps for Success:
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Assign Ownership: As the QuickSight administrator, designate ownership for each migrated dashboard to appropriate BI authors, configuring permissions and access controls as necessary.
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Validate and Accept: As Quick authors, verify that visualizations and calculations match the original dashboards through side-by-side comparison.
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Publish and Go Live: Once validation is complete, authors can publish dashboards and set up permissions for sharing, allowing for a seamless transition to live dashboards in Amazon QuickSight.
Get Started Today
You’ve seen the full journey—from Marketplace subscription to production-ready dashboards. Whether migrating 10 dashboards or 10,000, AWS Transform provides a governed pathway to Amazon QuickSight. With its AI capabilities and Wavicle’s migration expertise, your team can shift focus from managing BI infrastructure to deriving insights faster than ever before. You’ve invested years in your dashboards, so why not bring them to Amazon QuickSight in just days?
About the Authors
Anantha Choppalli: Chief Architect at Wavicle Data Solutions, focused on AI-powered migration solutions.
Ahil Gunasekaran: Sr. Solutions Architect at Wavicle Data Solutions, specializing in AI migration.
Taher Paratha: Sr. Software Engineer at Wavicle Data Solutions, developing migration solutions.
Rajesh Rathod: Leading product management for AWS Transform at Amazon Web Services.
Srikanth Baheti: Senior Manager for Amazon QuickSight, with a background in scalable web applications.
Vasha Bhatari: Senior Product Manager at Amazon QuickSight, specializing in simplifying BI migrations.
Venky Hosur: Senior Partner Solutions Architect at AWS, focusing on enterprise cloud solutions.
Ying Wang: Senior Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, dedicated to supporting customers in data analytics.
Embark on your migration journey today and leverage the power of modern analytics with Amazon QuickSight!