At the end of July Gartner has released next wave (for the present year - 2012) of their most interesting reports - Hype Cycles (http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/hype-cycles/).
What’s a hype cycle?
Gartner claims that each technology’s life cycle follows the same pattern - first, it’s triggered and presented to the community / market. As it’s an emerging technology, even its creators do not know both its limits and true potential either - anyway, the overall hype is being built as expectations (sometimes based on false hopes) raise. Hype reaches the peak of inflated expectations and then it becomes more and more clear that the technology ain’t the silver bullet (again …) - it’s a time of disillusioning. Fortunately after everyone’s sane again, people start to realize that even if the given technology isn’t a cure for all the evil of this world, it still has some use (this knowledge comes with practical experience). Such enlightenment leads to real productivity (without all the “hype thing”).
Using Gartner’s terminology, these are the phases described above:
- Technology trigger
- Peak of inflated expectations
- Trough of disillusionment
- Slope of enlightenment
- Plateau of productivity
Gartner publishes plenty of such reports, for various groups of technologies - each report shows which particular technologies are at which moment of their hype cycle (there are also priority matrices, I’ll try to make some description of those next time).
As an Accenture employee, you have an access to Gartner’s hypecycles using https://myresearch.accenture.com. The ones I found particularly interesting this year are:
- Cloud Computing (Big Data still at the peak, PaaS at the peak, SaaS going up to plateau)
- Big Data (Web Analytics maturizing, MapReduce in disillusionment phase, video search hype building)
- Application Development (RIA in deep disillusionment, mobile in productivity, enterprise mashups obsolete)
- Application Architecture (HTML5 at hype peak, CEP at hype peak, event driven architectures raising again)
What’s your thought? Have you find any of the hype cycles particularly interesting?