The cycle
assesses the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 36 key
technologies and trends during the next 10 years.
It puts Web 2.0 at what Gartner calls the 'peak of inflated
expectations' – although technologies like mobile phone payments
and enterprise Instant Messaging have matured from the 'trough of
disillusionment' to climb the 'slope of enlightenment'. Each
technology takes a path from a trigger point – when the product is
launched and generates press interest, up to the peak of inflated
expectations, down into the trough of disillusionment, after
failing to meet these expectations, and then up the slope towards
the 'plateau of productivity'.
This year’s hype cycle highlights three major themes that are
experiencing significant activity and which include new or heavily
hyped technologies, where organisations may be uncertain as to
which will have most impact on their business: Web 2.0, Real World
Web and Applications Architecture.
1. Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a collective term for internet technologies and business
models that, for the most part, let people collaborate and share
information online. Particular focus has been given to user-created
content, lightweight technology, service-based access and shared
revenue models.
Web 2.0 technologies rated by Gartner as having
transformational, high or moderate impact include:
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the use of
information and knowledge from many people and their personal
networks. It involves collecting massive amounts of data from
multiple sources, analysing the data to identify relationships and
mining it for new information. It enables new ways of performing
vertical applications that will result in significantly increased
revenue or cost savings for an enterprise. Gartner rates it as high
impact and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years.
Gartner said that SNA can successfully impact a business by
being used to identify target markets, create successful project
teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions.
Ajax is also rated as high impact and capable
of reaching maturity in less than two years. Ajax is a collection
of techniques that web developers use to deliver an enhanced, more
responsive user experience in the confines of a modern browser (for
example, recent version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla,
Safari or Opera).
A narrow-scope use of Ajax can have a limited impact in terms of
making a difficult-to-use web application somewhat less difficult.
However, even this limited impact is worth it, says Gartner, and
users will appreciate incremental improvements in the usability of
applications. High levels of impact and business value can
only be achieved when the development process encompasses
innovations in usability and reliance on complementary server-side
processing (as is done in Google Maps).
Collective intelligence enables new ways of
doing business across industries that will result in major shifts
in industry dynamics. Gartner rates it as transformational: it is
expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to 10 years.
Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual
content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that
results from individuals working together with no centralized
authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing
content, metadata, software and certain services.
Mashups are lightweight tactical integrations
of applications or content into a single offering. Because mashups
leverage data and services from public websites and web
applications, they’re lightweight in implementation and built with
a minimal amount of code. Their primary business benefit is that
they can quickly meet tactical needs with reduced development costs
and improved user satisfaction. Gartner warns that because they
combine data and logic from multiple sources, they’re vulnerable to
failures in any one of those sources. Mashup is rated as moderate
on the Hype Cycle but is expected to hit mainstream adoption in
less than two years.
2. Real World Web
Increasingly, real-world objects will not only contain local
processing capabilities – due to the falling size and cost of
microprocessors – but they will also be able to interact with their
surroundings through sensing and networking capabilities.
The emergence of this Real World Web will bring the power of the
web, which today is perceived as a "separate" virtual place, to the
user's point of need of information or transaction.
Technologies rated as having particularly high impact
include:
Location-aware technologies should hit maturity
in less than two years. Location-aware technology is the use of GPS
(global positioning system), assisted GPS (A-GPS), Enhanced
Observed Time Difference (EOTD), enhanced GPS (E-GPS), and other
technologies in the cellular network and handset to locate a mobile
user.
Users should evaluate the potential benefits to their business
processes of location-enabled products such as personal navigation
devices (for example, TomTom or Garmin) or Bluetooth-enabled GPS
receivers, as well as WLAN location equipment that may help
automate complex processes, such as logistics and maintenance.
Whereas the market sees consolidation around a reduced number of
high-accuracy technologies, the location service ecosystem will
benefit from a number of standardised application interfaces to
deploy location services and applications for a wide range of
wireless devices.
Location-aware applications will hit mainstream
adoption in the next two to five years. An increasing number of
organizations have deployed location-aware mobile business
applications, mostly based on GPS-enabled devices, to support queue
business processes and activities, such as field force management,
fleet management, logistics and good transportation.
The market is in an early adoption phase, and Europe is slightly
ahead of the United States, due to the higher maturity of mobile
networks, their availability and standardisation.
Sensor Mesh Networks are ad hoc networks formed
by dynamic meshes of peer nodes, each of which includes simple
networking, computing and sensing capabilities. Some
implementations offer low-power operation and multi-year battery
life. Technologically aggressive organisations looking for low-cost
sensing and robust self-organising networks with small data
transmission volumes should explore sensor networking.
The market is still immature and fragmented, and there are few
standards, so suppliers will evolve and equipment could become
obsolete relatively rapidly. Therefore, this area should be seen as
a tactical investment, as mainstream adoption is not expected for
more than ten years.
3. Applications Architecture
The software infrastructure that provides the foundation for
modern business applications continues to mirror business
requirements more directly. The modularity and agility offered by
service oriented architecture at the technology level and business
process management at the business level will continue to evolve
through high impact shifts such as model-driven and event-driven
architectures, and corporate semantic web. Technologies rated as
having particularly high impact include:
Event-driven Architecture (EDA) is an
architectural style for distributed applications, in which certain
discrete functions are packaged into modular, encapsulated,
shareable components, some of which are triggered by the arrival of
one or more event objects.
Event objects may be generated directly by an application, or
they may be generated by an adapter or agent that operates
non-invasively (for example, by examining message headers and
message contents). EDA has an impact on every industry.
Although mainstream adoption of all forms of EDA is still five
to 10 years away, complex-event processing EDA is now being
used in financial trading, energy trading, supply chain, fraud
detection, homeland security, telecommunications, customer contact
centre management, logistics and sensor networks, such as those
based on RFID.
Model-driven Architecture is a registered
trademark of the Object Management Group (OMG). It describes OMG's
proposed approach to separating business-level functionality from
the technical nuances of its implementation
The premise behind OMG's Model-Driven Architecture and the
broader family of model-driven approaches (MDAs) is to enable
business-level functionality to be modelled by standards, such as
Unified Modeling Language (UML) in OMG's case; allow the models to
exist independently of platform-induced constraints and
requirements; and then instantiate those models into specific
runtime implementations, based on the target platform of choice.
MDAs reinforce the focus on business first and technology
second.
The concepts focus attention on modelling the business: business
rules, business roles, business interactions and so on. The
instantiation of these business models in specific software
applications or components flows from the business model. By
reinforcing the business-level focus and coupling MDAs with SOA
concepts, you end up with a system that is inherently more flexible
and adaptable.
Corporate Semantic Web applies semantic web
technologies, also known as semantic mark-up languages (for
example, Resource Description Framework, Web Ontology Language and
topic maps), to corporate web content.
Although mainstream adoption is still five to 10 years
away, many corporate IT areas are starting to engage in semantic
web technologies. Early adopters are in the areas of enterprise
information integration, content management, life sciences and
government.
Corporate Semantic Web promises to reduce costs and improve the
quality of content management, information access, system
interoperability, database integration and data quality.
Applying the hype cycle to your business
“The emerging technologies hype cycle covers the entire IT
spectrum but we aim to highlight technologies that are worth
adopting early because of their potentially high business impact,”
said Jackie Fenn, Gartner Fellow and inventor of the first hype
cycle.
One of the features highlighted in the 2006 Hype Cycle is the
growing consumerisation of IT.
“Many of the Web 2.0 phenomena have already reshaped the web in
the consumer world”, said Fenn. “Companies need to establish how to
incorporate consumer technologies in a secure and effective manner
for employee productivity, and also how to transform them into
business value for the enterprise”.
Despite the changes in specific technologies over the years, the
hype cycle's underlying message remains the same: don't invest in a
technology just because it is being hyped, and don't ignore a
technology just because it is not living up to early
expectations.
“Be selectively aggressive – identify which technologies could
benefit your business, and evaluate them earlier in the Hype
Cycle”, said Fenn. “For technologies that will have a lower impact
on your business, let others learn the difficult lessons, and adopt
the technologies when they are more mature.”
Gartner's definitions of the hype cycle stages
1. "Technology Trigger": The first phase of a
Hype Cycle is the "technology trigger" or breakthrough, product
launch or other event that generates significant press and
interest.
2. "Peak of
Inflated Expectations": In the
next phase, a frenzy of publicity typically generates
over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some
successful applications of a technology, but there are typically
more failures.
3. "Trough of Disillusionment": Technologies
enter the "trough of disillusionment" because they fail to meet
expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the
press usually abandons the topic and the technology.
4. "Slope of Enlightenment": Although the press
may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue
through the "slope of enlightenment" and experiment to understand
the benefits and practical application of the technology.
5. "Plateau of Productivity": A technology
reaches the "plateau of productivity" as the benefits of it become
widely demonstrated and accepted. The technology becomes
increasingly stable and evolves in second and third generations.
The final height of the plateau varies according to whether the
technology is broadly applicable or benefits only a niche
market
