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Gartner's Special Report: Should you believe the hype?

Enough hot air to carry a balloon to the Moon

The Internet of Things is riding high at the Peak of Inflated Expectations as Big Data and wearable tech plummet toward the Trough of Disillusionment.

Sound like gobbledygook? Well at least you didn’t pay Gartner for the privilege of reading up on the progress of emerging tech in the infamous hype cycle that the crystal ball gazer insists on publishing annually for the past 20 years.

The central theme to the summer ’14 collection is about plotting the “journey” to digital business, looking at the direction of travel for more than 2,000 technologies that have been hyped to death, or that Gartner estimates will have a big impact.

Apparently, the “Hype Cycle Special Report" concerning “The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” is the “broadest aggregate Gartner Hype Cycle”. Still with us? Good.

Quantum Computing, Human Augmentation and the Brain-Computer Interface - the latter which IBM is trying to further - are climbing the innovation trigger with expectations rising. But forget these for now, they are more than ten years away from mainstream readiness or adoption.

Riding high at the Peak of Inflated Expectations are the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable tech and consumer 3D printing but all are now headed on a downward trajectory toward the Trough of Disillusionment.

The ToD is the place every vendor dreads - Gartner said it is when initial interest wanes and experimentations have failed to deliver. Investment then only continue if the creators better their products to make early adopters smile.

Languishing in the swampy area of Hype Cycle in the ’14 report are cloud computing, virtual reality and joining them in the not-too-distant future are Big Data, cyptocurrencies, and in-memory database management systems.

Technologies on the Slope of Enlightenment - presumably those that coughed to Gartner for advice on getting out of the ToD - include 3D scanners, In-Memory analytics and Activity Streams.

As of July, just one technology, Speech Recognition, was listed as being in the Plateau of Productivity zone, meaning it is being consumed by the masses.

If words are not enough - and in this case they may not be - any customers wanting to get more of a feel for the Hype Cycle can find a video link embedded in the Special Report. We think it's special, and hope you do too. ®

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