From corporate blogging to carbon nanotubes and speech recognition to service-oriented architecture, the 2005 Gartner Hype Cycle highlights 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. It covers 44 technologies and trends.
Strategic planners who advise their organizations on the adoption of emerging technologies use the Hype Cycle as a guide.
* 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.
The Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle is 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. "The pattern resonated so deeply with technology planners, that we received requests the following year for an update. Every year since 1995, we have been publishing an Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle and applied the model to an ever increasing number of IT and business domains," said Jackie Fenn, Gartner fellow and creator of the first Emerging Technology Hype Cycle in 1995.
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 programs 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.
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.
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 organizations 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 marketplace, potential applications, and ultimately the relevance to your business today and tomorrow."
Collaboration
"The IT industry is awash with hype and buzzwords, and Gartner's Emerging Technologies Hype Cycles cuts through this to offer an independent overview of the relative maturity of technologies in any given domain," said Alexander Linden, research vice president at Gartner. "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."
* 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 e-mail, data store, and documents. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are competing for customer attention, adding to the hype but customers 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 while raising productivity.
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