Forget Big Data hype, says Gartner as it cans its hype cycle

Even the nerdy kids understand it now, so it's time to move on to cooler stuff like 'smart dust'

Analyst outfit Gartner has decided that Big Data hype is so last year and canned its hype cycle for Big Data.

In new research titled “The Demise of Big Data, Its Lessons and the State of Things to Come” the firm says “we did it to move the big data discussion past hype and into practice” and also because “Hype Cycles consider any adoption trend that goes beyond 20% of the wider IT market to be past hype and entering into early market definition.”

Hype, the analyst says, “... is now being replaced by practicality, because the technology and information asset types offer new alternatives that are most often additive or complementary to long-standing, traditional practices. This type of overhyped evolution will happen again. When it does, information and analytics leaders should recognize it for what it is.”

Indeed, the hype's already started, so much so that Gartner's now doing hype cycles for five related topics:

• Advanced Analytics and Data Science
• Business Intelligence and Analytics
• Enterprise Information Management
• In-Memory Computing Technology
• Information Infrastructure

Gartner's hype cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2015. Embiggen here.

Losing its own hype cycle means Big Data has also fallen off Gartner's Emerging Technologies hype cycle. But don't fret, dear readers, “Smart Dust” has just made it on at the bottom, while both the internet of things and autonomous vehicles are about to pass the peak of inflated expectations and slide down into the trough of disillusionment where they'll each spend five to ten years. ®