The LSE Directory / Alternative data
AWS Data Exchange is a data marketplace operated by Amazon Web Services that lets AWS customers browse a shared catalogue, subscribe to third-party data products, and receive that data directly inside their own AWS account, as flat files delivered to Amazon S3, live tables shared through Amazon Redshift, or API calls that update automatically as the source data changes. The service reached general availability on November 13, 2019, with more than 1,000 data products from over 80 qualified providers at launch, including Reuters, Change Healthcare, Dun & Bradstreet, TransUnion, Foursquare, Pitney Bowes and Virtusa. The catalogue has since grown to more than 3,500 data products from over 300 providers, with more than 1,000 of them offered free. Rather than collecting or licensing data itself, AWS Data Exchange acts as a billing, entitlement and delivery layer inside AWS Marketplace: providers set their own subscription or usage-based pricing and retain ownership of their data, while AWS handles discovery, contracting and secure delivery, so subscribers skip building bespoke ingestion pipelines, FTP transfers or shipped hard drives for each vendor. The catalogue is organised into industry solutions spanning financial services, advertising and marketing, healthcare and life sciences, retail and CPG, media and entertainment, and travel and hospitality. In financial services the vendor roster includes FactSet, CME Group, ICE Data Services, Morningstar, Refinitiv and Xignite, plus a rolling 30-day Reuters news archive, letting analysts, data scientists and engineers pull pricing, fundamentals, ownership and news data straight into existing Redshift, S3 or Athena workflows without negotiating a separate contract for each feed. The service launched under general manager Stephen Orban, who had previously worked at Dow Jones and Bloomberg before joining AWS. At launch he said "the way customers exchange data hasn't evolved much in the last 20 years," pointing to firms still shipping hard drives and managing FTP credentials between each other. Delivery through Amazon Redshift data shares and through auto-updating data APIs were both added in 2021, and FactSet joined the marketplace that November, publishing more than 30 proprietary datasets through Redshift Data Sharing. AWS Data Exchange operates as a service within Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, rather than as a standalone company.
