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Hyped technologies for 2005: Gartner rates the buzz-words


Hyped technologies: digital paper, P2P VoIP, podcasting, grid computing, corporate blogging, desktop search, XBRL, RSS, biometrics. Expectations inflate, disillusionment sinks in and eventually a plateau of productivity is found. Gartner researchers have charted the lot.

See the 2005 Hype Cycle (opens in new window)Yesterday the company released its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, assessing the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 44 technologies and trends over the coming decade.

Carbon nanotubes and speech recognition, service-oriented architecture and RFID also feature in the Hype Cycle which charts the progression of an emerging technology from conception, to market over-enthusiasm, through a period of disillusionment, to an eventual understanding of the technology's relevance and role in a market or domain.

As such, the Hype Cycle provides a valuable aid to strategic planners who advise their organisations on the adoption of emerging technologies.

The Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle is just one of 68 hype cycles released by Gartner in 2005. More than 1,600 information technologies and trends across more than 60 markets, regions and industries are evaluated by more than 300 Gartner analysts in the most comprehensive assessment of technology maturity in the IT industry.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Gartner's Hype Cycle, which was first introduced as a commentary on the common pattern of human response to technology. Says Jackie Fenn, Gartner Fellow and creator of the first Emerging Technology Hype Cycle in 1995: "The pattern resonated so deeply with technology planners, that we received requests the following year for an update." So updates have been published every year since.See the 1995 Hype Cycle (opens in a new window)

Alexander Linden, a research vice president at Gartner, acknowledges that the IT industry is awash with hype and buzz words. Gartner's Hype Cycles endeavour to cut through this to offer an independent overview of the relative maturity of technologies in any given domain. "It provides not only a scorecard to separate hype from reality, but also models that help enterprises to decide when they should adopt a new technology," he said.

Invest now or later?

According to Linden, companies can feel compelled to invest prematurely in a technology because it is being hyped or, conversely, they may ignore a technology just because it is not living up to early expectations. He urged organisations to be selectively aggressive in identifying technologies that could be beneficial to their business and evaluate these earlier in the Hype Cycle.

"For technologies that will have lower impact on your business, let others learn the difficult lessons, and then adopt the technologies when they are more mature," Linden said. "It's less a matter of don't believe the hype and more a case of do believe the hype but only in the wider context of the market place, potential applications and ultimately the relevance to your business today and tomorrow."

Key themes to monitor

The Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle covers the entire IT spectrum, but Gartner has identified three key technology themes businesses should watch as well as highlighting some of the individual technologies in those areas. Technologies that will enable the development of Collaboration, Next Generation Architecture and Real World Web are highlighted as being particularly significant.

Collaboration

A number of key collaboration technologies designed to improve productivity and ultimately transform business practices are identified in the Hype Cycle:

Podcasting: podcasting offers a way to 'subscribe' to radio programmes and have them delivered to your PC. Gartner predicts that podcasting subscriptions will grow increasingly important as the market for content continues to fragment, which will lead to a massive shift in radio, and ultimately TV content delivery. Podcasting is an extremely efficient method for delivering audio and spoken-word content to niche audiences and as such could become an important corporate communications tool.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Voice over IP (VoIP): Vendor-proprietary P2P VoIP applications are under development although security concerns still need to be addressed. Services like Skype currently enjoy significant consumer adoption and are beginning to make inroads into the business landscape. Gartner predicts that the technology will be important for collaborative and multimedia applications as well as low-cost communications.

Desktop Search: Also known as personal knowledge search, this is an individual productivity application, residing on the desktop and using local processing power to provide search-and-retrieve functionality for the desktop resident's local email, data store and documents. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are competing for customer attention, adding to the hype; but customers are not exhibiting much interest in buying solutions. However, desktop search will become a standard feature in Microsoft Longhorn, currently planned for 2006, and should reduce content recreation, increase content reuse whilst raising productivity.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS): RSS is a simple data format that enables websites to inform subscribers of new content and distribute content more efficiently by bypassing the browser via RSS reader software. RSS is widely used for syndicating weblog content but its corporate use is only starting to be tapped for activities such as corporate messaging. Its simplicity makes it easy to implement and add to established software systems. Gartner predicts that RSS will be most useful for content that is 'nice to know' rather than 'need to know'.

Corporate Blogging: This involves the use of online personal journals by corporate employees, either individually or in a group, to further company goals. It reached the peak of hype in 2004, although mainstream firms have not yet become involved. Its impact will be on projecting corporate marketing messages primarily and secondarily in competitive intelligence, customer support and recruiting.

Wikis: A simple, text-based collaborative system for managing hyperlinked collections of web pages. Wiki is an acronym for "What I Know Is". A wiki usually enables users to change pages or comments created by other users. Wikis are becoming available from commercial vendors, in addition to many open-sourced products, but not yet from established enterprise vendors. However, they are widely used as collaborative, distributed authoring systems for online communities, especially those using open-source projects. Gartner predicts that Wikis will impact ad hoc collaboration, group authoring, content management, web site management, innovation, project execution and research and development.

Next Generation Architecture

David Cearly, another research vice president at Gartner, believes that Next Generation Architecture will constitute the third big era in the IT industry's history (the first having been the hardware era and second belonging to software). These emerging technologies will form key pillars of the new architecture:

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): SOA uses interactive business components designed to be meaningful, usable and useful across application or enterprise boundaries. Despite the current disillusionment with SOA, Gartner expects support for SOA to grow and for it to mature as a technology within 10 years although many changes in user and vendor organisations and technologies are required before SOA reaches its full potential. However, in the longer term, Gartner believes that SOA has the potential to be transformational to a business.

Web Services-Enabled Business Models: These productivity-boosting models represent a new approach to doing business among enterprises and consumers that would not have been possible without the benefits of web-services. However, enterprises are still wrestling with what web services will do and Gartner believes that the potentially transformational impact of Web Services-Enabled Business Models will have to wait for more-mature standards and clearer examples.

Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL): This is an Extensible-Markup-Language-defined standard for analysing, exchanging and reporting financial information. XBRL helps organizations meet multiple financial reporting needs through a single instance of financial data. It also improves the timeliness and accuracy of financial and regulatory reporting, validation and distribution. XBRL enables integration, aggregation, validation and comparison of financial data. It also automates sourcing and the review of financial data for activities such as loan acceptances, investment portfolio management and risk reviews. Financial accounting software vendors are already incorporating XBRL and regulatory and transparency pressures increase the significance and likelihood of XBRL adoption. However, there have been setbacks in XBRL adoption in the past year; the most significant have been delays in the FDIC and FSA projects that will mandate XBRL reporting.

Business Process Platforms (BPP): BBP provide business process flexibility and adaptability. They use SOA design principles and are metadata and model driven. Gartner believes that Business Process Platforms will enable business process fusion and move innovation from business application vendors to BPP ecosystems. Ultimately they will replace customised business applications and custom development by extending core applications platforms with composite applications.

Real World Web

Jackie Fenn believes that adding networking, sensing and processing to real-world objects and places is creating a 'Real-World-Web' of information that will enhance business and personal decision-making. Ms Fenn highlighted three technologies from the 2005 Hype Cycle that will help to make this a reality:

Location-aware applications: These are mobile enterprise applications that exploit the geographical position of a mobile worker or an asset, mainly through satellite positioning technologies like Global Positioning System (GPS) or through location technologies in the cellular network and mobile devices. Real-world examples include fleet management applications with mapping navigation and routing functionalities, government inspections and integration with geographic information system applications. Mobile workers will use either a PDA or smartphone, connected via Bluetooth to an external GPS receiver, or stand-alone positioning wireless device.

Radio Frequency Identification (Passive): Otherwise known as RFID, passive Radio Frequency Identification has been somewhat over-hyped in recent years, although vehicle-based systems are strong. It involves the tagging of very small chips to arbitrary types of objects. These chips transform the energy of radio signals into electricity then respond by sending back information that is stored on the chip. The most conducive environments for passive RFID are chaotic or unstructured business processes where RFID's ability to read without a direct line of sight gives it the edge over traditional bar-coding methods. These might include such diverse activities as manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, animal tracking and laundry automation.

Mesh Networks – Sensor: Mesh Networks are ad hoc networks formed by dynamic meshes of peer nodes, each of which includes simple networking, computing and sensing capabilities. Potential impact areas include low-cost industrial sensing and networking, low-cost zero management networking, resilient networking, military sensing, product tagging and building automation.

Ms Fenn concluded that although the specific technologies change over the years, the Hype Cycle's underlying message endures. "Don't invest in a technology just because it is being hyped or ignore a technology just because it is not living up to early over expectations," she said. "If a technology fits with your overall business strategy you should be evaluating it from the outset, if you are unsure, wait until more research is available."

Looking back to 1995

Looking back over 10 years of Hype Cycles, Ms Fenn reflected how the technologies on the 1995 Hype Cycle have evolved. "Wireless communications have exploded into hundreds of underlying technologies, standards and applications, and the information superhighway has manifested itself through the internet and World Wide Web to drive ubiquitous information access, new forms of community and whole industries built around online commerce," she said. "However, some technologies didn't fare so well; videoconferencing, handwriting recognition and speech recognition are still featured 10 years later on the 2005 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle as they struggle toward mainstream adoption."

About the Gartner Hype Cycles

Gartner's Hype Cycles assess the maturity, impact and adoption speed of hundreds of technologies across a broad range of technology, application and industry areas. It highlights the progression of an emerging technology from market over enthusiasm through a period of disillusionment to an eventual understanding of the technology's relevance and role in a market or domain.

The Hype Cycle is an educational tool that helps explain why technologies should be adopted based on your individual needs and goals, rather than on the generic levels of hype and disillusionment in the marketplace.

You can view the 1995 and 2005 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycles by clicking the thumbnails in this page.

Gartner's Hype Cycle Model follows five stages:

Technology Trigger: A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant press and industry interest.

Peak of Inflated Expectations: During this phase of over enthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of well-publicized activity by technology leaders results in some successes, but more failures, as the technology is pushed to its limits. The only companies making money are conference organizers and magazine publishers.

Trough of Disillusionment: Because the technology does not live up to its over-inflated expectations, it rapidly becomes unfashionable. Media interest wanes, except for a few cautionary tales.

Slope of Enlightenment: Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of organizations lead to a true understanding of the technology's applicability, risks and benefits. Commercial, off-the-shelf methodologies and tools ease the development process.

Plateau of Productivity: The real-world benefits of the technology are demonstrated and accepted. Growing numbers of organizations feel comfortable with the reduced levels of risk, and the rapid growth phase of adoption begins.

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