Online retailer Amazon could be about to embark on a venture that will see it offer data analytics services to businesses, according to reports.

The New York Times’ Bits blog quotes “specialists in data science” who say that Amazon has become increasingly interested in the business models of companies that create and sell pattern-finding algorithms for large data sets.

And Amazon already stores vast amounts of data for companies through its web services business, so…

“Rumour and speculation” was Amazon’s response to the blog, but Forrester Research VP Kyle McNabb said: “Amazon has the expertise and the computing power to do something like this. They could rent an analytics engine to people on a quarterly basis, possibly offer to match your data to other large data sets and find something useful.”