Gartner 2015 Hype Cycle: Big Data is Out, Machine Learning is in

Gartner, the leading market and technology research firm, has published its 2015 Hype Cycle Report of Emerging technologies.


Fig. 1: Gartner 2015 Hype Cycle.

For comparison, here is


Fig. 2: Gartner 2014 Hype Cycle.

What's the Hype Cycle about?

As technology advances, we all get over-excited about new buzz-words & trends in technology and then disappointed when expectations of results go down. Some of these emerging technologies do make tremendous changes and a huge shift.
The hype cycle gives us an idea of which of these technologies actually survive the market hype and have a potential to become a part of our daily life. The special report on emerging technologies is based on the assessment of maturity, duration for adoption, business benefit and future direction of more than 2,000 technologies, grouped into 112 areas.

Five regions of Gartner's Hype cycle: Innovation Trigger(potential technology breakthrough kicks off), Peak of Inflated Expectations(Success stories through early publicity), Trough of Disillusionment( waning interest), Slope of Enlightenment (2nd & 3rd generation products appear) and Plateau of Productivity (Mainstream adoption starts).

Here are some of the key Big Data-related technologies:

• Autonomous vehicles, their placement is shown to have shifted from pre-peak 2014 to peak 2015 of the Hype Cycle. According to Gartner, "while autonomous vehicles(like driverless cars) are still embryonic, this movement still represents a significant advancement, with all major automotive companies putting autonomous vehicles on their near-term roadmaps".
• Internet of Things (Network of Intelligent objects around us coordinating activities) remains consistently almost at the Peak in both years. It is thought of as the most disruptive technology in decades once widely deployed.
• Natural Language Process Question Answering, last year’s winner, is on its slide down to the Trough. It may not make it through.
• Big data is no where to be seen the hype cycle 2015 where as last year it is shown to enter trough of disillusionment. This may mean that the most talked about big data related technologies are now into practice and no more a hype.
• "Machine Learning" made its first appearance on the chart this year, but already past the peak of inflated expectations and now takes the place of Big Data.
• Digital Humanism, as Gartner defines makes people better, not technology better.Wearables and the Internet of ThingsMore, the established trends are at the top of the "peak of inflated expectations" on the cycle, along with machine learning and advanced analytics. All those trends are expected to plateau in between two and five years.
• Citizen Data Scientist: Gartner this new class of Citizen Data Science and is shown in 2015 but not in 2014 and is expecting to reach plateau in 2-5 years in the innovation trigger region.Gartner research director Alexander Linden suggests cultivating “citizen data scientists”—people on the business side that may have some data skills, possibly from a math or even social science degree—and putting them to work exploring and analyzing data.
• Enterprise 3D printing and gesture control technologies are heading for the plateau fast but are currently placed in the "slope of enlightenment".
• Digital dexterity is new, Today's employees possess a greater degree of digital dexterity," said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. "They operate their own wireless networks at home, attach and manage various devices, and use apps and Web services in almost every facet of their personal lives. Gartner has outlined several ways in which the IT organization should exploit employees' digital dexterity.
• Data security which is rather a critical discussion today seems to be surprisingly less of a hype and is shown as "Digital Security" in pre-peak and close to trigger region of the hype cycle.
• None of these technologies entered the plateau of productivity unlike Speech Recognition last year. This may change in the upcoming years with more technologies growing mature.

Which technologies do you think are over-hyped and which ones might survive the hype?

Related:

• Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms: who gained and who lost
• 3 Reasons Big Data Projects Fail
• 4 Problems with Big Data (And How to Solve Them)