Hyped Technology Themes for 2006: Web 2.0, Real World Web, Applications Architecture
By Sophia Mayengbam
  
Researcher Gartner has identified AJAX, mashups, location-aware software and sensor mesh networking as the key emrging technologies that will have the greatest impact on business over the next 10 years...

  
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Researcher Gartner has identified AJAX, mashups, location-aware software and sensor mesh networking as the key emrging technologies that will have the greatest impact on business over the next 10 years.

In its 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle report, highlights three major themes that are experiencing significant activity and which include new or heavily hyped technologies, where organisations may be uncertain as to which will have most impact on their business. The list was divided under three themes: Web 2.0, Real World Web and Application Architecture.

Web 2.0

Under the Web 2.0 umbrella, technologies to have high impact on businesses are AJAX and social network analysis (SNA), which are expected to reach its maturity in less than two years.

Gartner said that SNA can successfully impact a business by being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions.

Gartner said a narrow-scope use of Ajax can have a limited impact in terms of making a difficult-to-use Web application somewhat less difficult. However, Gartner said, even this limited impact is worth it, and users will appreciate incremental improvements in the usability of applications. High levels of impact and business value can only be achieved when the development process encompasses innovations in usability and reliance on complementary server-side processing (as is done in Google Maps).

Garner rated collective intelligence as transformational and is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

Mashup is rated as moderate on the Hype Cycle but is expected to hit mainstream adoption in less than two years. Their primary business benefit is that they can quickly meet tactical needs with reduced development costs and improved user satisfaction. Gartner warns that because they combine data and logic from multiple sources, they’re vulnerable to failures in any one of those sources.

Real World Web

Under Real World Web falls Sensor Mesh Netoworks, Location-aware technologies and Applications. Gartner said increasingly, real-world objects will not only contain local processing capabilities—due to the falling size and cost of microprocessors—but they will also be able to interact with their surroundings through sensing and networking capabilities.

Location-aware technologies that use GPS and mobile networks to pinpoint users will hit mainstream adoption in the next two to five years, said Gartner.

Another area is Sensor Mesh Networks that offer low-power operation and multi-year battery life. Technologically aggressive organizations looking for low-cost sensing and robust self-organizing networks with small data transmission volumes should explore sensor networking. Gartner said the market is still immature and fragmented, and there are few standards, so suppliers will evolve and equipment could become obsolete relatively rapidly.

Applications Architecture

Gartner has rated Event-driven Architecture (EDA), Model-driven Architecture (MDA) and Corporate Semantic Web as having high impact under Applications Architecture.  

Gartner said although mainstream adoption of all forms of EDA is still five to ten years away, complex-event processing EDA is now being used in financial trading, energy trading, supply chain, fraud detection, homeland security, telecommunications, customer contact center management, logistics and sensor networks, such as those based on RFID.

MDAs reinforce the focus on business first and technology second. The concepts focus attention on modeling the business: business rules, business roles, business interactions and so on. The instantiation of these business models in specific software applications or components flows from the business model. By reinforcing the business-level focus and coupling MDAs with SOA concepts, you end up with a system that is inherently more flexible and adaptable.

Gartner claims Corporate Semantic Web will reduce costs and improve the quality of content management, information access, system interoperability, database integration and data quality.

Fig. 1: 2006 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies

Jackie Fenn, Gartner Fellow and inventor of the first hype cycle said that one of the main features the 2006 Hype Cycle is the growing consumerisation of IT. “Many of the Web 2.0 phenomenon have already reshaped the Web in the consumer world”, said Fenn. “Companies need to establish how to incorporate consumer technologies in a secure and effective manner for employee productivity, and also how to transform them into business value for the enterprise”.