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Gartner’s 2010 Hype Cycle Special Report has examined the maturity of 1,800 technologies and trends in 75 technology, topic, and industry areas. Key themes emerging from this year’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies include:
- User experience and interaction. New styles of user interaction will drive new usage patterns, giving organizations opportunities to innovate how information and transactions are delivered to customers and employees. This includes devices such as media tablets and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and interaction styles such as gesture recognition and tangible user interfaces.
- Augmented reality, context and the real-world Web. The migration of the Web phenomenon ‘” and technology in general ‘” beyond the desktop and into the context of people’s everyday lives is creating new opportunities for personalized and contextually aware information access. Augmented reality is a hot topic in the mobile space, with platforms and services on iPhone and Android platforms, and it represents the next generation as location-aware applications move toward the plateau. Other elements such as 4G standard, sensor networks and context delivery architecture are evolving more slowly, but will play a key role in expanding the impact of IT in the physical world.
- Data-driven decisions. The quantity and variety of digital data continue to explode, along with the opportunities to analyze and gain insight from new sources such as location information and social media. The techniques themselves, such as predictive analytics, are relatively well established in many cases; the value resides in applying them in new applications such as social analytics and sentiment analysis.
- Cloud-computing implications. The adoption and impact of cloud computing continues to expand. In Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, cloud computing overall appears just topping the peak, and private cloud computing is still rising. Cloud/Web platforms are featured, along with mobile application stores, to acknowledge the growing interest in platforms for application development and delivery
Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. Each Hype Cycle drills down into the five key phases of a technology’ s life cycle.
Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories’”often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’ s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.
Source: Gartner Newsroom