Gartner has released its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies,
assessing the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 44 technologies
and trends over the coming decade. It is intended to be an aid to strategic planners who advise their organisations on
the adoption of emerging technologies.

Gartner says the Hype Cycle’s underlying message is: "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."

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.
• Peer to Peer (P2P) voice over IP (VoIP).
  Vendor-proprietary P2P VoIP applications are under development although
  security concerns still need to be addressed.
• 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.
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS is a
  simple data format that enables web sites to inform subscribers of new
  content and distribute content more efficiently by bypassing the
  browser via RSS reader software.
• Corporate Blogging. This involves the use of
  online personal journals by corporate employees, either individually or
  in a group, to further company goals.
• Wikis. A simple, text-based collaborative
  system for managing hyperlinked collections of web pages; it usually
  enables users to change pages or comments created by other users.

Next Generation Architecture
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). SOA uses
  interactive business components designed to be meaningful, usable and
  useful across application or enterprise boundaries.
• 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.
• Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).
  This is an Extensible-Markup-Language-defined standard for analysing,
  exchanging and reporting financial information.
• Business Process Platforms (BPP). BBP provide
  business process flexibility and adaptability.

Real World Web
Ms 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.