The weekend review: BYOD, AWS, and oDesk
This week it seems that all eyes are on Austin, Texas: South by Southwest’s Interactive conference kicked off on Friday, and thousands of startups, corporations, entrepreneurs, journalists, and everyone in between are descending into Texas to join the five-day festival. Our colleagues at GigaOM are covering SXSW from Texas, while our analysts will be keeping watch on the bigger-picture items from the festival. In the meantime, check out the most popular research content on GigaOM Pro:
In “Taking the friction out of a fast-and-loose work economy,” Stowe Boyd sits down with Gary Swart, the CEO of oDesk, to chat about the over 540,000 companies that use the service to find and hire contractors. Boyd reveals some surprising statistics about “lift, not shift,” Swart’s description of how U.S. companies create work both in the U.S. and overseas (as opposed to outsourcing labor for their entire company) and how oDesk is establishing itself as a global player in the freelance economy.
Next, in “Planning a BYOD strategy on the move,” Cormac Foster provides a practical guide for enterprises that want to implement a smart, dynamic BYOD strategy. Acknowledging that most companies already have an ad-hoc system in place, Foster provides guidance for establishing an oversight team, creating standards and metrics, and ensuring that you have buy-in from key departments across a given organization before embarking on a phased buildout.
Last, in “Three things Amazon Web Services should do to remain on top,” David Linthicum takes a look at the latest Gartner report on public cloud computing adoption, with a eye on the rising importance of the IaaS market. While AWS is clearly the biggest IaaS player — for now — Linthicum offers his own take on what AWS can do in order to maintain its lead in the market.
Also popular this week:
The wearable-computing market: a global analysis
A near-term outlook for big data
Connected consumer 2013: how 2012 laid the groundwork for change
