Gartner’s Hype Cycle 2005

Gartner has released its 2005 Hype Cycle for emerging technologies. It assesses the maturity, impact, and adoption speed of 44 technologies and trends over the coming decade.

Gartner has identified three key technology themes businesses should watch as well as highlighted 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 Alexander Linden, Research Vice-president at Gartner, 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.”

David Cearly, 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) uses interactive business components designed to be meaningful, usable and useful across application or enterprise boundaries.

Web Services-Enabled Business Models represent a new approach to do business among enterprises and consumers that would not have been possible without the benefits of Web-services.

Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). This is an Extensible-Markup-Language-defined standard for analysing, exchanging and reporting financial information. XBRL helps organisations meet multiple financial reporting needs through a single instance of financial data.

Business Process Platforms (BPP) provide business process flexibility and adaptability. They use SOA design principles and are metadata and model driven.