Gartner releases the "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2014", the annual report (now in its 20th year) detailing the analyst's assessment of the maturity, business benefit and future direction of over 2000 technologies.
New Hype Cycles for 2014 include Digital Workplace, Connected Homes, Enterprise Mobile Security, 3D Printing and Smart Machines.
"The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is the broadest aggregate Gartner Hype Cycle, featuring technologies that are the focus of attention because of particularly high levels of hype, or those that Gartner believes have the potential for significant impact," the analyst says. "Enterprises should use this Hype Cycle to identify which technologies are emerging and use the concept of digital business transformation to identify which business trends may result."
Gartner names Digital Business as this year's central theme, meaning the "emerging" technologies to support businesses in the coming years. As such it identifies 6 stages (Analog, Web, E-Business, Digital Marketing, Digital Business and Autonomous) for enterprises to gauge where they are today and where they can go in the future, with the final 3 being the most relevant for the Hype Cycle.
The Digital Marketing stage involves the so-called Nexus of Forces (mobile, social, cloud and information) providing new and more sophisticated means to reach customers such as software-defined anything, neurobusiness, data science, NFC, gesture control and speech recognition, among others.
Digital Business follows as the first "post-nexus" stage. This involves the convergence of people, business and things, as well as the Internet of Things and the concept of blurring the physical and virtual worlds. At this stage enterprises need to start looking into technologies such as digital security, speech-to-speech translation, connected home, 3D bioprinting and machine-to-machine communications, as well as enterprise 3D printing and 3D scanning.
The final post-nexus stage, Autonomous, is also the most futuristic-- it is the one where enterprises start leveraging on technologies providing humanlike or human-replacing capabilities such as virtual personal assistants, human augmentation, brain-computer interfaces and quantum computing.
"Although we have categorized each of the technologies on the Hype Cycle into one of the digital business stages, enterprises should not limit themselves to these technology groupings," Gartner concludes. "Many early adopters have embraced quite advanced technologies, such as autonomous vehicles or smart advisors, while they continue to improve nexus-related areas, such as mobile apps-- so it's important to look at the bigger picture."
