NEW DELHI INDIA: Gartner has examined the maturity of 1,650 technologies and trends in 79 technology, topic, and industry areas. These findings have been published in 'Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009.' Each Hype Cycle provides a snapshot of key technologies and trends in a specific technology, topic, geographic region, or industry domain.

The report's the coverage has expanded to include Hype Cycles on topics such as cloud computing, data center power and cooling technologies, media broadcasting, photovoltaic solar energy, and virtualization.

The 'Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies' is the longest-running annual Hype Cycle, providing a cross-industry perspective on the technologies and trends that IT managers should consider in developing emerging-technology portfolios.

This Hype Cycle 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 Gartner believes have the potential for significant impact.

“Technologies at the peak of inflated expectations during 2009 include cloud computing, e-books (such as from Amazon and Sony) and Internet TV (for example, Hulu), while social software and microblogging sites (such as Twitter) have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among enterprise users,” said Jackie Fenn, VP, Gartner Fellow, and co-author of the book Mastering the Hype Cycle.

“Looking at real benefit, rather than the hyped expectations, we see a number of potentially transformational technologies that will hit the mainstream in less than five years, including Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual world and service-oriented architecture (SOA),” Fenn said.

“Longer term, beyond the five-year horizon, RFID, 3D printing, context-delivery architectures, mobile robots, and human augmentation will be transformational across a range of industries,” Fenn added.

Additional analysis on some of the technologies and trends at the peak of inflated expectations that will reach the plateau in two to five years are included below:

Cloud computing: As enterprises seek to consume their IT services in the most cost-effective way, interest is growing in drawing a broad range of services (for example, computational power, storage and business applications) from the 'cloud', rather than from on-premises equipment. The levels of hype around cloud computing in the IT industry are deafening, with every vendor expounding its cloud strategy and variations, such as private cloud computing and hybrid approaches, compounding the hype.