Cloud Computing continues to hover around a peak of inflated expectations, but it is headed down toward a trough of disillusionment.
That's the gloomy prognosis from research firm Gartner's latest "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies" report which looks at 1,800 technologies and trends, charting the reaction they elicit, from over-enthusiasm to disenchantment to eventual understanding.
Gartner predicts that it will be two to five years before cloud computing reaches mainstream adoption, at the same time as speech recognition, biometric authentication, Internet micropayment systems and gesture recognition.
Over a five to ten year span, technologies Gartner expects to hit mainstream adoption include public virtual worlds, 4G wireless, augmented reality, speech-to-speech translation, 3D printing and video search.
"The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies features technologies that are the focus of attention in the IT industry because of particularly high levels of hype, or those that may not be broadly acknowledged but which we believe have the potential for significant impact," said Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner Fellow.
"High-impact technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2010 include private Cloud Computing, augmented reality, media tablets (such as the iPad), wireless power, 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and activity streams, while cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among enterprise users.”
Key themes emerging from the report include:
- User experience and interaction. New styles of user interaction will drive new usage patterns, giving organisations opportunities to innovate how information and transactions are delivered to customers and employees. This includes devices such as media tablets and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and interaction styles such as gesture recognition and tangible user interfaces.
- Augmented reality, context and the real-world Web. The migration of the Web phenomenon - and technology in general - beyond the desktop and into the context of people's everyday lives is creating new opportunities for personalised and contextually aware information access. Augmented reality is a hot topic in the mobile space, with platforms and services on iPhone and Android platforms, and it represents the next generation as location-aware applications move toward the plateau. Other elements such as 4G standard, sensor networks and context delivery architecture are evolving more slowly, but will play a key role in expanding the impact of IT in the physical world.
- Data-driven decisions. The quantity and variety of digital data continue to explode, along with the opportunities to analyse and gain insight from new sources such as location information and social media. The techniques themselves, such as predictive analytics, are relatively well established in many cases; the value resides in applying them in new applications such as social analytics and sentiment analysis.
- Value from the periphery. A number of technologies, such as mobile robots and 3D printing, are not yet widely used, but they can already provide significant value when used appropriately.
