Hype Cycle for Education 2011

Industry Research G00214466

Hype Cycle for Education, 2011 Published: 29 July 2011

Analyst(s): Jan-Martin Lowendahl

The major trends of consumerization, sourcing options and need for standards are real in the form of technical turmoil for the CIO. This Hype Cycle gives an education CIO a toolbox of emerging technologies for flexibility, if combined right.

Table of Contents Analysis..................................................................................................................................................3 What You Need to Know..................................................................................................................3 The Hype Cycle................................................................................................................................4 The Priority Matrix.............................................................................................................................8 Off the Hype Cycle...........................................................................................................................9 On the Rise....................................................................................................................................10 Campus App Store...................................................................................................................10 Wireless aaS.............................................................................................................................11 Affective Computing.................................................................................................................13 Quantum Computing................................................................................................................14 BPO.........................................................................................................................................16 BYOD Strategy.........................................................................................................................17 SIS International Data Interoperability Standards.......................................................................18 Open-Source SIS.....................................................................................................................19 Learning Stack.........................................................................................................................20 Cloud Email for Staff and Faculty..............................................................................................21 COBIT......................................................................................................................................22 At the Peak.....................................................................................................................................24 Digital Preservation of Research Data.......................................................................................24 Gamification.............................................................................................................................25 Social Software Standards........................................................................................................27

User-Centric IAM......................................................................................................................28 Mobile-Learning Low-Range/Midrange Handsets.....................................................................30 Social-Learning Platform for Education.....................................................................................32 Media Tablet.............................................................................................................................33 Open-Source Middleware Suites..............................................................................................35 Web-Based Office Productivity Suites.......................................................................................36 Cloud HPC/CaaS.....................................................................................................................38 Sliding Into the Trough....................................................................................................................40 EA Frameworks........................................................................................................................40 Open-Source Financials............................................................................................................43 E-Textbook...............................................................................................................................45 Mobile-Learning Smartphone....................................................................................................46 Lecture Capture and Retrieval Tools.........................................................................................47 Unified Communications and Collaboration...............................................................................48 Hosted Virtual Desktops...........................................................................................................50 Open-Source Learning Repositories.........................................................................................53 Virtual Environments/Virtual Worlds...........................................................................................54 Global Library Digitization Projects............................................................................................55 Emergency/Mass Notification Services.....................................................................................55 SaaS Administration Applications.............................................................................................59 Climbing the Slope.........................................................................................................................61 802.11n....................................................................................................................................61 Intellectual Property Rights and Royalties Management Software.............................................62 IT Infrastructure Utility...............................................................................................................64 ITIL...........................................................................................................................................69 Mashups..................................................................................................................................71 E-Portfolios...............................................................................................................................72 Game Consoles as Media Hubs...............................................................................................73 Open-Source Portals................................................................................................................74 Social Media in Education.........................................................................................................75 CRM for Enrollment Management.............................................................................................76 Web and Application Hosting....................................................................................................78 Entering the Plateau.......................................................................................................................79 Organization-Centric IAM..........................................................................................................79 SOA.........................................................................................................................................81 Windows-Based Tablet PCs.....................................................................................................83 Page 2 of 97

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Federated Identity Management...............................................................................................84 Open-Source E-Learning Applications......................................................................................86 Off the Hype Cycle.........................................................................................................................87 Blogs........................................................................................................................................87 Grid Computing........................................................................................................................88 Microblogging...........................................................................................................................89 Podcasting Learning Content...................................................................................................91 Appendixes....................................................................................................................................92 Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels..........................................................94 Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................................95

List of Tables Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases.................................................................................................................94 Table 2. Benefit Ratings........................................................................................................................94 Table 3. Maturity Levels........................................................................................................................95

List of Figures Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Education, 2011...............................................................................................7 Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Education, 2011...........................................................................................9 Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Education, 2010.............................................................................................93

Analysis What You Need to Know "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed," is a quote attributed to science fiction writer William Gibson that's an apt way of describing the challenges facing education CIOs today. The impact of consumerization and the cloud that we have seen coming for a number of years is now creating a technical turmoil that is hitting campuses with full force. Many CIOs are scrambling to deal with it, while at the same time making quick progress in narrow areas, such as email in the cloud for students or identity and access management. However, in general, the response is very clear: Go back to the roots, focus on your core competencies and build a "flexible infrastructure." But is this right? Shouldn't there be more focus on the direct productivity of the institution and the faculty/student? In the CIO Agenda Survey 2011 we see clear evidence of this trend, with "improving technical infrastructure" placing third among the CIO's perception of

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institution priorities (see "The 2011 Higher Education CIO's Agenda: Lean Controlled Growth").

What used to be just "infrastructure" and a mere "cost of entry" for being in the education and research "business" is now perceived as a key institution strategy. This is further underlined by CIOs ranking "developing or managing a flexible infrastructure" first in the list of CIO strategies. The key word here is not "infrastructure," it is "flexible." Education institutions have always been and should continue to be a safe haven for diversity and innovation founded in the tradition of academic freedom. However, this is increasingly difficult in a challenging financial climate that favors economies of scale that imply standardization, not flexibility, and in a time where existing technical solutions take time, are costly to change and, thus, are seen as inhibitors rather than enablers of change. To find a competitive advantage, "one size does not fit all," and CIOs need to find a way to better exploit technology by harnessing and integrating the innovative power of faculty and students for their own personal productivity — hence, the key word "flexibility" and a need to open up institutional infrastructures even more.

The Hype Cycle for Education, 2011, identifies a number of emerging technologies from which the CIO can put together an institution-specific toolbox of enabling technologies that enhance personal and organizational productivity. The trick is to have the right balance of tools and time for the implementation of technology capabilities so that they are creating an ecosystem of technical capabilities that enable synergies of cost-effective flexibility for the infrastructure and the end user.

The Hype Cycle In the 2011 Hype Cycle, we continue our broadened scope, which includes K-12 and higher education. We do this because we continue to see an increase in the crossover of technologies, services and methodologies between the two. We see more vendors of services such as e-learning and ERP solutions that often originated in the higher education space adapt and expand their offerings into the K-12 space. We note the increasing need to define standards, such as grades and e-portfolio metadata, in the whole education community to enable the seamless mobility of students and their achievements. We also see an increasing need for higher education institutions to understand what skills and expectations the prospective students bring with them to their institutions.

The 2011 Hype Cycle retains the three major trends from 2010: consumerization, sourcing and standards as keys to achieve the goal of flexibility identified in the CIO Agenda Survey of 2011. The difference is that the time for proactive planning or strategizing is almost gone, and the technical turmoil is already here and needs to be countered now. This turmoil must be dealt with while ensuring a sustainable strategy for future change. This implies two things: a need to understand the sustainable technological capabilities the institution should implement now, and how to source those capabilities in a sustainable way to enable the IT-organization to become more agile.

CIO responses to the technical turmoil are unevenly distributed, with singular technology capabilities such as cloud email for students reaching a market penetration of more than 50% in the U.S. and Australia (see "E-Mail as a Service as an Icebreaker: The E-Mail Sourcing Trend in Higher Education, 2006 to 2010"), leading this technology to be removed from the Hype Cycle this year.

Federated identity management, another crucial technology capability, shows a similar trend, approaching 70% penetration globally according to our latest survey. On the other hand, the education community is slower to implement service-oriented architecture (SOA) and formal Page 4 of 97

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sourcing strategies. These are all crucial components of building a technical ecosystem of synergies (see "Case Study: Approaching the Learning Stack: The Third-Generation LMS at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya" and "Public-Sector IT Sourcing in EMEA: What Government and Higher Education Can Learn From Each Other"). But it is reassuring to see new tools are being adding to the education CIO toolbox, such as the learning stack, campus app store, BYOD ("bring your own device") strategy and wireless as a service (aaS).

This picture emphasizes the state of technical turmoil, and with that comes the need to improve the institution's ability to make choices quickly and correctly. This is admittedly not a strong trait in most education institutions, yet it is crucial that IT governance leverage capabilities represented by more formal frameworks such as enterprise architecture (EA) and COBIT, as well as more lightweight Gartner tools such as the Hype Cycle and the Strategic Technology Map The increasing dependence on IT and the opportunity to use IT in all areas of the institution puts the CIO in a position to affect the future of the institution. However, CIOs need to develop their ability from merely optimizing alignment (in general) and timing (in particular) to strengthen and demonstrate the value of the IT department to the core business of the institution. Building institutional (business) capabilities based on technology that improves the institution's competitiveness is the endgame (see "Executive Perspectives: Strategic Business Capabilities and the Gartner Hype Cycle").

Since the 2010 Hype Cycle, several key technologies have made progress, seven have disappeared, six have been added, and three have changed names and/or been replaced with more education-aligned content.

The six new entries are all related to the impact of consumerization in the cloud on education institutions, and they represent predominately new sourcing strategies for the CIO: ■

BYOD ("bring your own device") strategy

■

Campus app store

■

Cloud email for staff and faculty

■

Gamification

■

Learning stack

■

Wireless aaS

Further refinement of our position in this context has led us to change the names and definitions slightly for three entries: ■

E-Learning repositories has been changed to "open-source learning repositories," because we judged that the former was just becoming a metadata-supported variant of generic content/ knowledge management with bleak outlooks inside institutions, while the latter has a real place in the exchange of content and experience in the larger education community, as proved by Merlot and MIT Open CourseWare content.

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â–

Pen-centric tablet PCs has been changed to "Windows-based tablet PCs" to further underline the subtle differences in the emerging tablet markets, where full-featured OS tablets such as Windows now represent a niche market, and where seasoned input devices such as pen and keyboard are now also combined with media tablet OS devices such as iOS iPad or Android tablets in various formats.

â–

Social-data portability has been retired and the concept included in "social software standards," which is the entry we now use to track this important topic.

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Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Education, 2011

expectations Mobile-Learning Low-Range/ Midrange Handsets User-Centric IAM Social Software Standards Gamification Digital Preservation of Research Data

Social-Learning Platform for Education Media Tablet Open-Source Middleware Suites Web-Based Office Productivity Suites Cloud HPC/CaaS EA Frameworks Open-Source Financials E-Textbook Mobile-Learning Smartphone

COBIT Cloud Email for Staff and Faculty

Lecture Capture and Retrieval Tools Learning Stack Open-Source SIS

Unified Communications and Collaboration

SIS International Data Interoperability Standards Quantum Computing Affective Computing Wireless aaS Campus App Store

BYOD Strategy BPO

Hosted Virtual Desktops Open-Source Learning Repositories Virtual Environments/Virtual Worlds Global Library Digitization Projects

Technology Trigger

Peak of Inflated Expectations

Trough of Disillusionment

Open-Source E-Learning Applications Federated Identity Management Windows-Based Tablet PCs CRM for Enrollment Management SOA Organization-Centric IAM E-Portfolios Web and Application Hosting Social Media in Education Open-Source Portals Game Consoles as Media Hubs Mashups ITIL IT Infrastructure Utility Intellectual Property Rights and Royalties Management Software 802.11n SaaS Administration Applications Emergency/Mass Notification Services As of July 2011

Slope of Enlightenment

Plateau of Productivity

time Years to mainstream adoption: less than 2 years

2 to 5 years

5 to 10 years

more than 10 years

obsolete before plateau

Source: Gartner (July 2011)

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The Priority Matrix The Priority Matrix for the Hype Cycle for Education is more nuanced and context-dependent than in most nonindustry Hype Cycles The reason is that benefit ratings can vary substantially, depending on the various types of institutions. Furthermore, we intentionally use some general Hype Cycle entries taken directly from topical Hype Cycles, such as the "Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture,2011," to relate to their overall standing in maturity and adoption. Both the specific institution context and the general hype/maturity aspect are very important in the assessment of when these technologies are "ubiquitous" enough to build new services or curricula on top of them.

This has the consequence that the benefit rating is not normalized to any specific type of institution and, more importantly, some technologies have benefit ratings that are relative to their niche technology category. The result can be seen in ratings such as high for cloud email for staff and faculty, while the ratings for the e-portfolios entry is only moderate. In the first case, the rating is due to the relative benefit to an internally managed mail solution. In the second case, the rating is relative to the original vision for e-portfolios and their importance to the core mission of education.

In this context, the transformational rating of SOA relates to a new paradigm of service delivery for the IT organization. Cloud HPC/CaaS is rated transformational because of its capability to be a resource equalizer among institutions, media tablet for the promise of even more ubiquitous computing, and quantum computing because of its promise to deliver virtually unlimited computing power.

To help clients determine which key investments in IT will be most strategic in positioning their institutions for long-term success in fulfilling their missions, we have developed a complementary tool to the Hype Cycle called the Strategic Technology Map (see "Strategic Direction and Timing in Education: Mashing Up the Strategic Technology Map and the Hype Cycle" and "Toolkit: Speed Up Your Innovation Process; How to Quickly Create Interactive Strategic Technology Prioritization Maps From the Education Hype Cycles"). The Strategic Technology Map has made it clear that achieving success is seldom about individual technologies or even singular chains of dependencies; it is truly about an ecosystem of technologies that must be mature enough to support the institutions' strategy (service). The Strategic Technology Map can help identify the strategic parts of the ecosystem and its interdependencies, while the Hype Cycle gives crucial information about the weakest link in the ecosystem, leading to better analysis of the timing of the "tipping point." If these tools are also combined with business model scenario planning (see the suite of five documents introduced by "Four 'Business Model' Scenarios for Higher Education: An Introduction to Strategic Planning Through Storytelling"), a sustainable, uniquely adapted and agile technology strategy can be devised for each institution.

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Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Education, 2011

benefit

years to mainstream adoption less than 2 years

transformational

SOA

2 to 5 years

5 to 10 years

Cloud HPC/CaaS

more than 10 years Quantum Computing

Media Tablet

high

CRM for Enrollment Management

Cloud Email for Staff and Faculty

Digital Preservation of Research Data

Hosted Virtual Desktops

Learning Stack

Organization-Centric IAM

Open-Source Learning Repositories

Intellectual Property Rights and Royalties Management Software

Social Media in Education

Open-Source Middleware Suites

Web and Application Hosting

Social-Learning Platform for Education

User-Centric IAM

SIS International Data Interoperability Standards

Unified Communications and Collaboration

moderate

E-Portfolios

802.11n

Affective Computing

Federated Identity Management

Emergency/Mass Notification Services

BYOD Strategy

Game Consoles as Media Hubs

E-Textbook

Lecture Capture and Retrieval Tools Mashups Open-Source E-Learning Applications Open-Source Portals Windows-Based Tablet PCs

IT Infrastructure Utility ITIL SaaS Administration Applications Web-Based Office Productivity Suites

BPO

Campus App Store COBIT Gamification Mobile-Learning LowRange/Midrange Handsets Mobile-Learning Smartphone Open-Source Financials Social Software Standards Virtual Environments/ Virtual Worlds Wireless aaS

low

Open-Source SIS

EA Frameworks

As of July 2011

Source: Gartner: (July 2011)

Off the Hype Cycle Seven technologies have been moved off our current Hype Cycle. â–

Cloud E-mail (for students) is off the Hype Cycle since it is well into the Plateau of Productivity, both in market penetration and in maturity, but it has been "succeeded" by cloud email for staff and faculty, which still has some years to go to reach the plateau.

â–

Grid computing, blogs, microblogging and wikis have all reached the Plateau of Productivity, and will not be followed in the context of the Hype Cycle.

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â–

Hosted PC virtualization software has been taken off the Hype Cycle because it is no longer relevant to most institutions. It is worth noting that this should not be confused with hosted virtual desktops, which is still of interest to many institutions.

â–

Podcasting learning content has been removed from the Hype Cycle because most of its intended use is subsumed by the superior functionality of lecture capture and retrieval tools.

On the Rise Campus App Store Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: The campus app store is simply a concept modeled on the iOS App Store or the Mac App Store, but only intended for one specific institution or in a shared-service environment. The idea is that a new student or employee connects his or her own device (BYOD) and downloads the apps relevant to their roles. The campus app store is intended to support more than one platform.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Education institutions, in particular, have to meet a varied demand, as well as high expectations on the workplace from their users. Of the three main user groups in institutions, only administrators can still be expected to accept a standardized workplace environment where the institutions provide both the hardware and the software. But even here we see grumbling in the ranks. For researchers and students, many institutions have in practice had to accept a BYOD reality for some years, leading to various strategies for subsidizing platforms and providing software through images, CD/DVDs or downloads in order to simplify the technical environment and reduce support costs.

This is especially relevant for the ever renewed cohorts of students that enroll every year, bringing along a varied assortment of devices bred on consumerized cloud services, all expecting the institution services to be at least on par with the likes of Google and Microsoft.

In this context, several organizations, not only education institutions, are taking the app store model to heart as a vision for achieving at least one part of a more flexible workplace for their knowledge workforce. To date, no mature app store exists, but projects such as the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) led "Learning App Store" project, with its â‚Ź3 million, promises to give more answers shortly. However, the pitfalls are many if the campus app store is to enable the vision of a truly BYOD environment. In particular, several choices for device-independent standards have to be made, and several standards, such as HTML5, have to mature.

Altogether, this merits only a very early position on the Hype Cycle and a possibly bumpy five- to 10-year road on the way to the Plateau of Productivity.

User Advice: Although a very simple idea in theory, a true device-independent campus app store will be hard to achieve. Initially, tough choices will have to be made on the standards applied and the devices supported. However, it is important to strive for device independence to enable crossplatform collaboration. A service-oriented architecture (SOA)/enterprise service bus (ESB) implementation such as that demonstrated by UOC will most likely be fundamental for a successful

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campus app store. Standardization approaches such as the Macquarie University on using HTML5based spreadsheets for business intelligence are probably going to be a crucial component as well.

An important feature of the app store vision is to stay as close as possible to the user experience of the most common consumer app stores, so that the "consumer knowledge" can be exploited in order to drive down support costs.

Business Impact: Some of the initial business impact will simply come from the flexibility in meeting the demands of increasing proliferation of consumer devices — increasing user productivity and satisfaction. But, the real opportunity for business impact lies in personalization of the set of apps used and the apps themselves. Having a simple process for adapting the apps to the institutional context (e.g., student information system data, human resource data) or providing coders/programmers, including students and faculty, a process to simply distribute institutionspecific apps has real promise.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Embryonic Recommended Reading: "Case Study: Approaching the Learning Stack: The Third-Generation LMS at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya"

Wireless aaS Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Wireless as a service (WaaS) in the education context is defined as when the institution buys wireless services from an external service provider to complement or replace its own network access.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: As more and more education, research and administrative services are delivered as IT services, reliable network access has become not only fundamental, but even critical. This is emphasized in the 2011 CIO survey where "improving technical infrastructure" is ranked No. 3 on the CIO's perception of the institution's strategic priorities and "developing and managing a flexible infrastructure" is ranked No. 1 in the CIO's own strategic priorities. Furthermore, we see several clients struggling with infrastructure upgrades just to keep up with demand in both bandwidth and access, both driven by change in user patterns such as bandwidth-hungry lecture capture and retrieval services and IP address, as well as accesspoint-hungry mobile devices. However, the real challenge is not campus access; it is mobile learning, which brings with it another dimension in scale. Both researchers and students have come to expect a seamless "anytime-anywhere" access to institutional IT services much like the way allowed by telcos' subscription packages and Web consumer services. With the increasing dependence on hybrid and online learning, the institution has the challenge of how to ensure scalable quality access and support for students way beyond campus.

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WaaS has existed for some time as predominantly a consumer-grade service based on 3G, and many institutions have negotiated deals with telcos to either provide or subsidize network access as a part of a mobile phone subscription. 3G networks have not had enough capacity and coverage area to be a real alternative to Wi-Fi. However, the recent launch of 4G together with corporate subscription services from a few telcos provides new opportunities to offer students and researchers the cost-effective ubiquitous bandwidth access they expect. Some telcos even offer platform as a service (PaaS) as an alternative to run institution-specific applications, which further spreads the risks and increases the options for load balancing and business continuity.

It is still early in terms of both 4G infrastructure rollout and maturity in the contract conditions the telcos provide, but we expect a fast-maturing service as students represent an interesting and important market segment. We contemplated introducing WaaS on the 2009 Education Hype Cycle, but did not do it on account of the lack of viable services.

Altogether, this means a fairly early position, before the peak on the Hype Cycle. But we expect a rather quick journey through it, closer to five years than 10 to the Plateau of Productivity.

User Advice: Even if the adoption of WaaS is triggered by a need to provide large cohorts of students with cost-effective access to institution services, there are several other benefits that can be achieved if the right contract is negotiated. They include ensuring increased bandwidth at the campus by allowing/requesting the telco to set up access points. Designed in the right way, this has a very positive impact on business continuity as it introduces another network completely independent of the campus network. (If this is combined with any other cloud services such as email or PaaS/SaaS for administrative systems, it further spreads the risk for total service breakdown.) A key issue for very mobile researchers and students is roaming cost. If the institution has remote or international locations or affiliates that are expected to travel a lot, a roaming tariff has to be included in the contract. Furthermore, as some services will still require high bandwidth not allowed or provided through mobile networks, the option of consolidation of both home and mobile Internet connections should be included in the contract negotiation.

Business Impact: The key business benefit is to provide real, ubiquitous access to institution services "anytime-anywhere" and, in particular, the student transparency with regard to the real cost for their education (required by law in some countries). Nontraditional students especially (who are increasing in numbers), who need to combine work and family with studies, need true mobile network access to be able to exploit all "dead time" (for example, commuting) to be more productive. But this type of IaaS has an impact on the IT organization's ability to address business continuity and, ultimately, provide them with more sourcing options that allow them to focus their resources and skills on the services that require specific institutional knowledge.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Embryonic Sample Vendors: Sprint

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Affective Computing Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Affective computing technologies sense the emotional state of a user (via sensors, microphone, cameras and/or software logic) and respond by performing specific, predefined product/service features, such as changing a quiz or recommending a set of videos to fit the mood of the learner. Affective computing tries to address one of the major drawbacks of online learning versus in-classroom learning: the teacher's capability to immediately adapt the pedagogical situation to the emotional state of the student in the classroom.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Affective computing technology is still at the proof-ofconcept stage in education, but is gaining more interest as online learning is continuing to expand.

Pure research-oriented interest (such as the University of Memphis' Institute for intelligent Systems with "AutoTutor") has now expanded into more practical projects by some online learning universities, such as the Open University of Catalonia. A major hindrance in its uptake is the lack of consumerization of the needed hardware and software involved, because it has to be inexpensively available for students as they use their personal devices. The automotive industry is more advanced, but even there, the technology has not yet found its way into actual vehicle production.

However, for example, addressing driver distraction is creating more awareness for mood sensing in a very practical and ubiquitous product. Effective affective computing most likely will involve a complex architecture in order to combine sensor input and provide an accurate response in real time. Mobile learning via cloud services and handheld devices, such as smartphones, is likely to play a key role in the first generations, with a larger market penetration due to the relatively controlled ecosystem it provides (high-capacity computing combined with a discrete device with many sensors).

User Advice: Most institutions should only continue to follow the research and development of affective computing in education and other industries. However, in order to be prepared for the strategic tipping point of implementation, institutions should start estimating the potential impact in terms of possible pedagogical gains and financial impact, such as increased retention for online learning. Institutions with a large online presence or ones that want to exploit the hype for brand recognition should get involved now. Partner with automotive suppliers, consumer electronics companies and universities (particularly online) to further explore this field.

Business Impact: Affective computing is an exciting area with the potential to bring back a bit of the lost pedagogical aspect of in-class learning and increase the personalization of online learning.

One very important advantage of this technology is that, even if it always will be inferior to a face-toface student-teacher interaction, it scales well beyond the more than 100 student lectures that even today offer limited individual pedagogical adaptivity. A potential complement or competition to remedy the scalability problem is the social-media-based peer mentoring approach as exemplified by www.livemocha.com. At least in the Livemocha example, it has been shown that a sufficient scale of the community of quality subject matter mentors can be reached by tapping the full Internet community of more than two billion users.

In general, affective computing is part of a larger set of approaches to further personalize the educational experience online. Another example is adaptive "pedagogical paths" that depend on

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statistical data of learners in the same position. It is also related to context-aware computing in general.

The ultimate aim of affective computing in education is to enhance the learning experience of the student, which should result in tangible results such as higher grades, faster throughput and higher retention. These results will benefit students, institutions and society.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Embryonic Sample Vendors: Affective Media; IBM

Quantum Computing Analysis By: Jim Tully Definition: In quantum computing, data is represented as qubits (quantum bits), which have the ability to represent all possible states simultaneously. This gives quantum computers the ability to operate exponentially faster than conventional computers as word length is increased, giving significant performance benefits over other architectures such as massively parallel processors.

Qubits have the ability to hold all possible values simultaneously; a property known as "superposition." The data value held in a qubit is affected by the values of other qubits, even if they are physically separated. This effect is known as "entanglement." Qubits must be held and linked in a closed quantum environment and must not be allowed to interact with the outside world, because they are very susceptible to the effects of noise. Two stages are involved in quantum computation.

Stage one involves execution of the algorithm and stage two is the measurement of the resulting data. Measurement is extremely difficult and, typically, destroys the quantum state as this involves interaction with the outside world. Some classes of problem would be executed extremely fast with quantum computers, including optimization, code breaking, DNA and other forms of molecular modeling, large database access, encryption, stress analysis for mechanical systems, pattern matching and image analysis.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: To date, no true quantum computing has been demonstrated in a verifiable way. The technology is in the relatively early research stage, but a number of significant advances have been made during the past several years: â–

Five-qubit computation using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) was demonstrated by the Technical University of Munich in 2000.

â–

This was followed by the first execution of Shor's algorithm using NMR techniques at IBM's Almaden Research Center and Stanford University in 2001.

In February 2007, D-Wave Systems demonstrated (with considerable press coverage) a purported 16-qubit quantum computer, based on a supercooled chip arranged as four times four elements.

The company followed this with longer qubit demonstrations.

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The results of these demonstrations were inconclusive. To date, demonstrations have involved superposition, but did not demonstrate entanglement. They were not, therefore, "true" quantum computing. D-Wave has most recently focused its attention on the use of quantum techniques for optimization purposes. Specifically, to a topic known as "quantum annealing." This technique finds the mathematical minimum in a dataset very quickly. Some researchers believe that general purpose quantum computers will never be developed. They will instead be dedicated to a narrow class of use — such as the optimization engine of D-Wave Systems. This suggests architectures where traditional computers offload specific calculations to dedicated quantum acceleration engines. Researchers generally talk of 100 qubits as being the threshold that marks the real value of quantum computing in comparison with traditional architectures.

The technology continues to attract significant funding, and a great deal of research is being carried out. Considerable problems exist in increasing the number of linked qubits available for computation, because of noise. The slightest amount of noise or interference while computation is occurring will cause the system to drop out of the quantum state and generate random results.

This noise is minimized using two techniques: ■

First, operating at very low temperatures using superconductors.

■

Second, enclosing the system within an intense magnetic field (or a comparable shielding scheme) for isolation reasons.

Shielding is probably the biggest single problem in quantum computing. In practical quantum computers, total isolation would not be feasible — so error correction schemes are being developed to compensate for small amounts of interference. Much of the current research on quantum computing is focused on these error correction schemes. Averaging out errors through multiple computations is the most promising approach, because it is not clear that fundamental quantum noise can be reduced. Some kinds of quantum cryptography actually make use of this difficulty in maintaining the quantum state. In quantum key distribution, for example, unauthorized access to the key can be detected through observation of the destroyed quantum state.

The amount of reported progress in quantum computing has increased a little during the past year, having previously stalled because of the economic downturn. We have, therefore, moved forward its position on the 2011 Hype Cycle. Any breakthroughs in this topic will probably be based on a certain amount of serendipity; however, the likelihood of a breakthrough occurring will no doubt be increased with higher funding levels.

User Advice: If a quantum computer offering appears, check if access is offered as a service. This may be sufficient, at least for occasional computing requirements. Some user organizations may require internal computing resources, for security or other reasons. In these cases, use of the computer on a service basis would offer a good foundation on which to evaluate its capabilities.

Business Impact: Quantum computing could have a huge effect, especially in areas such as: optimization, code breaking, DNA and other forms of molecular modeling, large database access, encryption, stress analysis for mechanical systems, pattern matching, image analysis and (possibly) weather forecasting.

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Benefit Rating: Transformational Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Embryonic Sample Vendors: D-Wave Systems; IBM; Stanford University; University of California

BPO Analysis By: Ron Bonig Definition: Gartner defines business process outsourcing (BPO) as "the delegation of one or more IT-intensive business processes to an external provider that, in turn, owns, administrates and manages the selected processes based on defined and measurable performance metrics." BPO offerings are categorized in two major categories: horizontal offerings (those that can be leveraged across specific industries) and vertical-specific offerings (those that demand specific industry vertical process knowledge).

Here, we discuss the vertical-specific education BPO. Education BPO includes offerings such as grant management, institutional research (aka business intelligence) and online academic programs.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Horizontal BPO is an established service in areas such as payroll and benefits management. Although it is used by education institutions, it has still not penetrated the education market to the same degree that it has the commercial market.

Gartner's latest survey shows that about one-fifth of respondents use traditional BPO. Vertical-specific BPO is still a relatively new phenomenon, at least as a commercial offering. Very few institutions have had the chance to try this new service, but there has been some interest among clients. However, because process maturity is generally low, and due to the caution traditionally found among education institutions, we believe this is a slow-mover on the Hype Cycle.

However, financial pressure and early successes can change this prediction.

User Advice: Education BPO is an interesting offering that is well worth investigating for reasons of quality, cost and focus of core resources. However, institutions considering it need to have a good understanding of their processes in general and process interfaces in particular. In addition, CIOs should have a comprehensive understanding of their service portfolios before they consider outsourcing business processes (understanding, of course, that the impetus for many of these initiatives begins with the business side, not the professional IT organization). Established skilled resources for vendor management are a must. A clear understanding of intellectual property rights and their safeguarding, as well as basic metrics, must be in place before a contract can be signed.

One of the areas where BPO in education is gaining ground is financial-aid processing in the U.S. This process requires a high degree of automation, a "bubble" of staff at specific times in the academic year and integration with the basic student information systems (SISs) of the institutions.

There appears to be no overwhelming leader, but numerous local/metropolitan area vendors.

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Business Impact: The effect on the institutions depends on the process chosen for BPO and the reasons for it. It is likely to assume that the effect will be mostly in the areas of efficiency and quality improvement. However, for areas such as institutional research (aka business intelligence), the effect can be strategic if it leads to more timely access to higher-quality data.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Campus Management; Datatel; Oracle; SunGard Higher Education Recommended Reading: "Gartner Higher Education Sourcing Survey 2009: What, How, How Much and Attitudes?"

"Higher Education 'Business Model' Scenarios: 'Everybody's U': Scale of Market" "Higher Education 'Business Model' Scenarios: 'All About U': Speed to Market"

BYOD Strategy Analysis By: Ron Bonig; Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: BYOD, which means "bring your own device," is set to become the dominant practice in higher education in the First World and is growing worldwide. BYOD in this context means BYOD as a deliberate strategy, as opposed to the "provide a standard device strategy" that has been popular in the past. Additionally, a BYOD strategy is emphatically not a "laissez-faire" approach, but a thought out and defined strategy. BYOD presents IT organizations in education with multiple challenges, but also provides multiple benefits.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: CIOs in HE/K-12 can no longer stop the wave of different consumer devices (not even among administrators). Also, it is not about handing out "monocultures" (such as iPhones and iPads) — students revolt against that. There is a need in education to formally adopt BYOD as a full strategy, and to willingly support and advocate the BYOD approach as a benefit for the students and the institution. Some institutions have seen the light and are moving toward this approach; others have not yet adopted it, but there is a significant possibility that this strategy will advance rapidly through the life cycle as institutions observe the benefits accruing to the early adopters.

User Advice: For IT organizations to take advantage of this trend, the security of the network and applications must be first rate and the systems the customers interface with must be capable of either transacting business in all of the major devices and operating systems, or the mobility strategy must be built around a common denominator protocol like HTML5. The situation is similar to Short Message Service (SMS) or texting: Texting is ubiquitous because it is device-, networkand operating-system-agnostic. It works virtually everywhere on most phones, smartphones and many handheld devices. It may not be "pretty" but it is effective. A mobility strategy for BYOD must

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be the same. It must work with almost any device that has a browser to be acceptable. The alternative is to program the front of many systems in iOS 4, RIM, Android or other mobile operating systems, which is an expensive proposition and a losing race. Accommodating each key handheld operating system would allow for the maximization of the user experience, but using a browserbased technology, while not the "prettiest" for each device, is ubiquitous and allows generalized mobility.

With such approaches as a virtualized desktop (cloud desktop), and using the functionality of server-based computing, such as Citrix, even devices of relatively limited native functionality can be effectively utilized by the various constituencies. However, it may be necessary for some specific applications to maintain a relatively small application group to build campus and institution-specific applications, offered through the campus's own app store — either for free or for a price. This approach could be used to effectively provide optional but desired services via a self-supporting financial model.

Business Impact: With the acceptance of the consumerization of technology and the nearuniversal acceptance of the use of personal devices to access and interact with enterprise systems, IT directors are embracing the trend of pushing transaction processing to the users to the users' delight (thereby making a virtue out of a necessity). It is a reversal of a 40-year trend of IT organizations having to collect and input data, or maintain the facility for driving transactions to specific ways and means of accessing enterprise data and performing transactions, whether online machines, kiosks, specific Web protocols and tools, etc. BYOD is in the Gartner Strategic Technology Map quadrant of being a "win" for both the organizations and the customers.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Recommended Reading: "Cool Vendors in Education, 2011"

SIS International Data Interoperability Standards Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Student Information Systems (SIS) International Data Interoperability Standards are about the data formats needed to facilitate and even automate global student mobility.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Increasing political pressure, such as the Bologna process, a general focus on recruiting international students, and awareness of the cost associated with processing international applications have sparked activity in standardization. Earlier work, such as the EduCourse schema supported by the Shibboleth project, has been followed by several others, such as the Metadata for Learning Opportunities, and now we see momentum building through the involvement of the vendor community. This has been shown in the actions of IMS Global Learning Consortium and the Rome Student Systems and Standards Group (RS3G), which have initiated activities focused directly on SIS interoperability. Recent activity by the

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Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (U.S. only) and the RS3G Mobility Project (a threecountry pilot) shows steady progress; however, these activities are still at an early stage.

User Advice: Institutions that expect to recruit extensively from abroad need to monitor the developments closely to be ready to adopt as soon as possible. Work through your vendor or consortium to establish a road map for adoption. The window during which this can be a competitive advantage is likely to be relatively small, and institutions should anticipate that it can quickly turn into a competitive disadvantage to not have this capability. However, when considering this capability, it should be noted that standards usually take a longer time to mature and be accepted than technologies on the Hype Cycle.

Business Impact: This has a direct impact on the ability to recruit students, as well as the cost for recruiting students. Visibility and scrutiny of institutional course offerings will increase with the PriceRunner-type comparison sites that will likely develop, and it will be important to master the factors that lead to applications from the "right" student profiles. In particular, interoperability of student data will enable a higher degree of process optimization, driving down both cost and risk.

Standardization at this level will also facilitate economies of scale of administration through shared services, which is something that the national or state education system will benefit from.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Embryonic Recommended Reading: "Findings: Bologna Process Demands True International Student and Course Data Standards in Higher Education Throughout the EU"

Open-Source SIS Analysis By: Ron Bonig Definition: Open-source higher education student information systems (SISs) are developed via open-source or community source models.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Open-source SISs have the potential to be part of a nonproprietary and highly customizable, higher education administrative application suite or a bestof-breed solution. However, features, functionality, processes, integration and support issues are still undefined. The most promising but complex offering is the Kuali Foundation's open-source SIS, Kuali Student. Release 1 of the Kuali Student Service System was due in 4Q09, but it was delayed.

A "founder's release" was eventually released on 30 April 2010, with general availability of the Kuali Student's Curriculum Management available in March 2011.

Kuali Student and the Kuali Foundation have faced financial issues related to two setbacks: One university dropped out due to budget cuts, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation closed its opensource software (OSS)-specific grants program, thus increasing competition for funds. Though the Foundation went through a period of change and uncertainty, it now appears to be stable, as shown

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through progress on its developing systems, as well as a very well-attended and active user conference in November 2010.

Note, however, that the Kuali Foundation's successes in forging partnerships with an ecosystem of commercial vendors to both contribute to and support the Kuali offerings are extremely important steps. This strategic move has provided institutions that wish to adopt a Kuali offering with a method of consistent and professional support — something that, when lacking, has led to the lack of adoption of some previous open-source initiatives.

Other positive trends include the moves of several European national SIS consortia toward at least OSS or community source licensing, even if there is hardly a community of a critical mass of skills.

However, there is the potential for collaboration among the different initiatives if the momentum builds for interoperability components, such as OSS higher education middleware suites and SIS international data interoperability standards.

User Advice: OSS for SIS is in the early stages and should be monitored for future development.

This part of Kuali Student should probably have fewer issues with national regulations, and it is more likely to be a candidate for internationalization than KFS for this reason. However, there is international interest in Kuali Coeus, the research management system.

Users should make sure that there exists a viable commercial support partner in their locales for implementation and long-term support of KFS. Business Impact: Student administration, and possibly integration with e-learning platforms and administrative back-end systems (e.g., finance and human resources/payroll), are areas that will be affected. Though lower licensing costs are an advantage of commercially supported open-source offerings, additional benefits include user control of the code and lack of vendor lock-in.

Benefit Rating: Low Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Embryonic Sample Vendors: Kuali Foundation Recommended Reading: "Student Information Systems in the North American Higher Education Market" "Overview of Kuali Administrative OSS Offerings for Higher Education" "Student Information Systems in the North American Higher Education Market"

Learning Stack Analysis By: Marti Harris Definition: A learning stack as an architectural construct is a collection of elements, such as applications, personal productively tools, Web 2.0 applications, content repositories and data Page 20 of 97

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sources, that can be accessed through, for example, a social learning platform. The learning stack is dynamic. Elements can be added, updated, removed, and replaced in the open structure of the social learning platform.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The development and adoption of the learning stack concept will follow the adoption of the open structure of social learning platforms. As the learning platform becomes more generic, the learning stack and the elements in the learning stack can become more specialized to academic subjects, in addition to including general-purpose elements.

An element in the stack that is subject-specific may be accessed through the learning platform by a specific group of users. General-purpose elements in the stack could include Web 2.0 applications and collaboration tools available to all users of the learning platform. The uptake of the use of the learning stack is dependent on the move away from point solution learning systems and toward a social learning platform.

User Advice: When looking to replace learning systems with next-generation social learning platforms, continue to examine the open structure of learning platforms and its ability to support the learning stack concept. This will ensure strategic decisions can be made regarding the choice of platform and of elements in the learning stack.

Business Impact: Providers of learning platforms need to provide an open structure in order to meet user expectations for easy access to collaboration, communications and content within their learning environment. Publishers of educational digital content will find new opportunities to present subject-specific applications as elements in the learning stack. Students will have more access to elements within the learning stack to allow for bottom-up use of learning platforms without the faculty members required to direct learning activities.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging

Cloud Email for Staff and Faculty Analysis By: Matthew W. Cain Definition: Many institutions use no-fee cloud email services for students, but few schools use the same service for staff and faculty. This technology summary is specifically for the use of no-fee cloud email services for staff and faculty.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Most institutions regularly rule out no-fee cloud email services for staff and faculty for control, legal or security reasons. Therefore expectations are low, and interest is minimal. We believe, however, that as more institutions have good experiences with cloud email services for students, they will increasingly consider the same service for staff and faculty, leading to higher expectations and further progress along the Hype Cycle. We also believe that vendors will get better at addressing control, security and legal concerns, by, for example, making archive and discovery services available and offering rich support and management

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services. As a result of these expected investments, and a growing comfort with the cloud email model, we believe that the time to Plateau will be within four to five years.

User Advice: Institutions contemplating no-fee cloud email services for staff and faculty should evaluate the services using six core criteria: economics, infrastructure alignment, features, migration effort, support/SLAs and security/legal/privacy. Regarding the latter point, institutions, working with internal security personnel, should assemble a checklist of the most critical security concerns to review with the vendors. The ability to access logs and mailboxes in case of an emergency should be understood. Support for SAS 70 Type II and other certification should be compared. Privacy statements should be scrutinized side-by-side and passed by legal personnel for added input. Legal review should scrutinize accommodations for local regulations such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) in the U.S., and support for US-EU Safe Harbor for non-U.S. institutions. Support for e-discovery and hold requests should be part of the comparison. Legal personnel should also decide if scrutiny of data location and domestic hosting provisions are important.

Business Impact: The cost of internally run email can be anywhere from $4 to $14 per user per month, so there can be significant savings for an institution moving to a no-fee cloud email service.

Other advantages of cloud email deployments include vendor-supplied upgrades, redeployment of IT staff, very large mailboxes and built-in disaster recovery services.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Google; Microsoft Recommended Reading: "Cloud E-Mail Decision-Making Criteria for Educational Organizations"

COBIT Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: COBIT is an IT control framework used as part of IT governance to ensure that the IT organization meets enterprise requirements. Although originally an IT audit tool, COBIT is increasingly being used by business stakeholders and IT management to identify and create IT control objectives that help mitigate risks, and for a high-level self-assessment of IT organizations.

Institutions can leverage COBIT to identify controls to embed in processes to better manage risks.

Using COBIT may be part of an institution-level compliance program or an IT process and quality program. COBIT is organized into four high-level domains (plan and organize, acquire and implement, deliver and support, and monitor and evaluate) that are made up of 34 high-level processes, with a variable number of control objectives for each.

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associated with it. Therefore, CIOs can use COBIT as part of a "checklist" in the institution, and to provide guidance regarding the kind of controls needed to meet the institution's ultimate goal of optimizing the yield of IT, but not as a prescriptive framework.

COBIT 4.1 was released in May 2007 by the ISACA to achieve greater consistency with its Val IT program, and to address some discrepancies in COBIT v.4. Supplementary guidance tools consist primarily of spreadsheets and mappings to other frameworks, such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). COBIT v.5 will be released in 2012 to integrate COBIT, Val IT and Risk IT frameworks, and to provide additional guidance.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Interest in COBIT is still growing very slowly in education. Its main use is still as an audit and benchmarking framework, rather than as a foundation for a governance framework. In this respect, education is lagging other industries. In education, the adoption of COBIT is often connected to the adoption of ITIL. As these projects are now well under way in more advanced institutions, they also begin to explore COBIT more. As the ITIL projects start climbing the Slope of Enlightenment, we still expect more interest and focus on COBIT, even if it moved more slowly than expected last year. As with ITIL, we see regional differences that largely follow those of ITIL with Australia and Northern Europe ahead, but market penetration is considerably lower. Higher education as a whole seems to be ahead of K-12.

User Advice: Institutions that are unfamiliar with COBIT should begin by examining the framework and the standard process framework used by COBIT. For most institutions today, COBIT is a good audit framework for motivating and monitoring change in institutional governance capabilities.

However, if COBIT is used to guide process improvement, the institution must assess (1) what the organizational scope of the improvement initiative is, and (2) whether the ultimate goal is operational process improvement or business transformation. If the goal is business transformation, then a more strategic approach to change involving all of the institution's management will be required. In any case, a COBIT-based improvement effort works best when more detailed frameworks like PRINCE2, Capability Maturity Model (CMM) or ITIL are implemented alongside it. All these frameworks help to improve different layers of governance maturity and have a synergistic effect if implemented wisely and not to the "letter." As with the case of ITIL, a tactical approach based on pain points and metrics will be the most secure way to success.

Business Impact: Governance of IT is a problem area for many institutions, and COBIT can play a significant role in raising maturity — first by helping identify weak areas through auditing, then by identifying best practices at least at the control objective level, as well as by keeping change momentum by tracking progress through benchmarking. The forthcoming COBIT v.5 holds some promise to further mature the alignment of the institutional value of IT. Large or complex institutions will likely find greater financial and performance benefits through improved governance — especially if COBIT is used as one of several tools to identify and rectify weak links between "demand governance" and "supply governance" of IT services (see "Defining IT Governance: The Gartner IT Governance Demand/Supply Model,").

Benefit Rating: Moderate

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Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Recommended Reading: "Global Standards Can Reduce the Adverse Effects of 'Administrative Freedom' in Higher Education" "Case Study: The Seven-Year Journey From Chaos to Order at Chalmers University of Technology" "Combine CobiT and ITIL for Powerful IT Governance" "How to Start a CobiT Deployment" "Defining IT Governance: The Gartner IT Governance Demand/Supply Model" "Leveraging COBIT for Infrastructure and Operations" "Understanding IT Controls and COBIT"

At the Peak Digital Preservation of Research Data Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Digital preservation in the higher education community context is the issue of dealing with very long-term storage and retrieval of primarily research data. The objective of digital preservation is to attain the same or better standard of archiving and retrieval that was set by centuries of handling paper archives, which, in some countries, formally exceeds hundreds of years.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Although the problem has been around for some time, the progress has been rather slow due to the pace of change in IT, as well as the perceived high cost from a total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective and a lack of monetary return on investment (ROI). The strategies for addressing the problem are well-developed in theory, but the practical solutions have not been as strong.

Previous years' leap in activity, when two major open-source software (OSS) repository communities, Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation, joined forces to create the DuraSpace organization and announced a "DuraCloud" Web-based service in their road map, has continued to show great promise, and the pilot projects' preliminary results are very positive. Even though the pilot projects have been delayed about half a year, there is a firm plan to open up for common access in July 2011. DuraCloud has even presented a price list for its services. The increasing maturity of the underlying cloud storage services, such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Windows Azure, makes it highly likely that this service will deliver on its promise — even if the promised economies of scale in cloud storage are a main feature that promises to overcome the TCO argument that previously haunted the issue, which is that the real long-term benefits lie elsewhere. There is the important death-of-distance effect on research communities that can now come together in an unprecedented way to create critical mass for even small topic areas. The Page 24 of 97

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cloud delivery model also brings a disintermediation of the IT departments that, more often than not, speed up the implementation. Finally, the retrieval of the data is greatly enhanced with the "de facto" user interface that software as a service (SaaS) inherently brings with it.

Altogether, this merits another large jump in terms of position on the Hype Cycle this year. We also estimate the time to plateau to be shortened to five to 10 years. The remaining issues are mainly metadata-related, and these will always be deeply embedded in the research areas.

User Advice: Digital preservation is starting to get the attention it deserves. With increased dependence on digital data, the principal relevance to research is increasing. The increasing volumes of data and potential cost-benefits in tiered storage will force institutions to adopt an information storage and retrieval strategy that includes the digital preservation of research data. The basic strategies now have to include cloud storage options. However, it is important to conduct proper due diligence of external providers, including not only operational procedures and exit strategies, but also privacy and legal matters. This area is well-suited for shared services or cloud computing solutions due to the obvious economies of scale, even in due diligence. The cloud option in particular means setting up or finding a broker that is within the academic sphere of trust, such as DuraCloud.

Business Impact: Success in handling the digital preservation problem in higher education is crucial for future research because more and more data exists only in the digital realm. In the long term, it has the potential to be transformational for research, especially for its ability to revisit raw data for new interpretations and to access very long series of data.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: DSpace; Fedora

Gamification Analysis By: Brian Blau; Brian Burke Definition: "Gamification" is the use of game mechanics in nonentertainment environments to change user behavior and drive engagement. Specifically, the aim is to encourage higher levels of participation from a target group by exploiting familiar, enjoyable and motivational mechanisms found in modern video games.

All games include game mechanics that describe the playing area, the players, and the challenges and rules that make game-play enjoyable. Gamification takes some of these mechanics and applies them to business challenges to motivate users to engage in higher and more meaningful levels of participation. Humans are "hard-wired" to enjoy games and have a natural tendency to engage for longer in something that they find entertaining. Gamification aims to harness this natural tendency to play along.

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Gamification has many uses that target consumers, employees and the Web "collective," and it impacts many areas of technology, including consumer products, applications and services.

Gamification technology comes in three forms; "gamified" platforms (such as Foursquare, SCVNGR and LevelUp); software services that integrate with custom-developed applications (usually delivered as software-as-a-service or self-service products); and purely custom implementations.

"Serious games" are a genre closely related to gamification, one that can be considered its precursor. This term typically refers to video games that are used not for entertainment but as simulations in the fields of emergency training, education, science, healthcare and the military.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Gamification is being applied to many different challenges relating to, for example, innovation, education, employee performance, healthcare, social change, business and work planning. Its current "sweet spot" is in the consumer market, both as a key aspect of good product design and in marketing and customer loyalty programs designed to increase user engagement.

The early indications are that gamification has a significant positive impact on user engagement rates, when applied in a suitable context. However, gamification also has significant challenges to overcome before widespread adoption can occur. Designing games is no easy task — during four decades of video game development many games have failed, despite their developers having the best intentions. A basic level of game mechanics (a points system, leaderboard, achievements/ awards or basic challenges) is often not enough to sustain increased engagement. Designing gamification services represents another challenge, one that requires careful planning and execution, and iteration. Overcoming these challenges will require successive integrations of gamification in a wide variety of consumer and enterprise scenarios.

User Advice: Gamification of consumer services, applications and enterprise processes can increase user interactivity and change behavior, resulting in greater user engagement. Users who have fun are more likely to become loyal users.

Recognize that simply including game mechanics is not enough to increase engagement, and that making them sufficiently rewarding requires planning, design and, over time, adjustments to keep users interested.

Match game mechanics to product goals in order to increase user engagement and retention.

When integrating game mechanics, match game-play to your desired values, and provide feedback and rewards. Also, for a broader reach, add "virality" and the ability to share experiences.

Business Impact: Gamification techniques can be used in a wide range of technology-, productand service-related scenarios to enhance product and service strategies. Their use is relevant to marketing managers, product designers, customer services managers, financial managers and human resources staff, among others, whose aim is to bring about longer-lasting and more meaningful interactions with customers, employees or the general public.

User engagement is at the heart of today's "always connected" culture. Incorporating game mechanics encourages desirable behaviors, which can, with the help of carefully planned scenarios

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and product strategies, increase user participation, improve product and brand loyalty, and build lasting and valuable relationships with the target audience.

The intended behavioral learning and the rewards that users will associate with it depend on the nature of the game, its setting and progression. Before designing the game mechanics, it is essential to determine an appropriate tempo and stimulus to reinforce desired behavior, along with appropriate rewards or penalties. Careful planning and improvement through iteration are central to every successful implementation of gamification.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Badgeville; Bunchball; Foursquare; SCVNGR Recommended Reading: "Marketing Essentials: Strategic Alternatives for Increased Engagement Using Gamification" "Gamification Primer: Life Becomes a Game" "Case Study: Innovation Squared: The Department for Work and Pensions Turns Innovation Into a Game" "Marketing Essentials: How to Create a Mobile Game for Your Brand or Product" "Market Insight: Lessons and Trends From the Evolution of Video Games" "Play to Win: Crowdsourcing Innovative Future-State Enterprise Architecture Models Through Game Play"

Social Software Standards Analysis By: Nikos Drakos Definition: Social software standards are protocols and data formats that have been agreed on by industry bodies or are, in practice, used by several products or services to support interoperability and for data/service access and reuse between social software environments.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: There are many formally agreed-on or de facto social software standards, but none has been universally adopted. Some of the most notable are: â–

OpenSocial — This API was developed by a group led by Google. It enables applications to access profile, relationship, activity and other social network data in any social networking environment that supports it. Apache Shindig is an open-source reference implementation of OpenSocial.

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ActivityStrea.ms — This provides serialized access to social events, using the JSON format or an XML Atom syndication format.

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PubSubHubbub — This server-to-server, publish-and-subscribe protocol is an extension to Atom and RSS that pushes feeds in near-real time to subscribing servers.

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Salmon — This pushes comments and annotations "upstream" to update the original source, such as a blog or profile page.

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OStatus — This combines established protocols (including some of those listed above) in a way that supports interoperability between distributed and independent social networks.

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OpenID — This decentralized authentication standard enables users to log in to multiple websites or online services using the same identity. Other single sign-on mechanisms supported by many online services include Facebook Connect and Google Accounts.

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OAuth — This is a mechanism for authorizing access to secure RSS/Atom feeds. (For more on OAuth and OpenID, see the "Hype Cycle for Identity and Access Management Technologies, 2011.")

In addition to these standards, which deal with authentication, profiles, connections and activity, other standards are commonly found alongside them in implementations of social applications and platforms. These include common Web-related standards and protocols — such as HTTP and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) — as well as other infrastructure and transport protocols (such as XMPP).

User Advice: Users should monitor agreed-on industry standards and de facto standards, and use them where available and appropriate. They should also encourage their vendors to support these standards in their products. OpenSocial and ActivityStrea.ms support is becoming more widespread in business social software suites. In 2010, OAuth was adopted by several online services including Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Business Impact: Standards can be used to design more flexible, open and user-friendly services for customers or employees, as well as to reduce dependence on a single software or service vendor. However, at least for the next three to five years, the dominance of a few social networking environments will limit the impact of these standards.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Facebook; Google; OpenID Foundation; StatusNet

User-Centric IAM Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl

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Definition: User-centric IAM is fundamentally about letting the most relevant organization/individual own and certify a user's claim to a user's attributes in order to allow access to a service. In its original form, it was designed to let a user aggregate and control its own identity attributes/claims with the relevant certifying parties, hence the name ''user-centric." However, experience of realworld access management situations has shown that many identity attributes (claims) cannot be fully controlled by the individual. The key traits of this IAM paradigm are "justifiable parties" with regard to a claim, rather than "user-centric control and consent." In user-centric IAM, the service provider trusts several "justifiable parties" in order to collect the certified claims needed to grant access to a service. An example of a future role for higher education institutions in user-centric IAM is to certify the degree of its students in the "claims ecosystem."

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: At the moment, user-centric IAM is the most hyped paradigm of the three IAM paradigms on this Hype Cycle (with the others being organization-centric IAM and federated IAM); however, it is also the least understood by the institutions and has not moved a lot since last year. There is a high level of confusion about what user-centric IAM is. None of our respondents in our most recent higher education IAM survey listed a technology that is specific only to user-centric IAM, such as OpenID. A benign interpretation of the data, such as that Shibboleth has connectors to OpenID, will give a penetration of at the most 10%, but the real number is probably well below 5%.

User-centric IAM can be seen as a natural evolution of federated IAM, which would position it for quick adoption as soon as the legal issues in federations are ironed out. In user-centric IAM, a single external organization-centric IAM is exchanged for several organization-centric IAMs as the source for verifying the number of claims needed to establish the role that grants access to a service.

However, user-centric IAM is still technologically immature and conceptually evolving. From a technological point of view, the market is changing, and there is some uncertainty of the future road map for what a full-fledged user-centric (claims-centric) framework might look like. Of the two real contenders from last year; OpenID and information card architectures (ICAs), ICAs has suffered a major blow since Microsoft has discontinued its CardSpace product, even if the claims design will continue to live in other products. On the other hand, OAuth has gained support as an open protocol for more secure HTTP-based access management. However, the technical issues are probably not the most prominent. From a legal and business case standpoint, there are many issues to consider before we have a full-fledge claims ecosystem of "justifiable parties." All together, the recent events lead us to rate the adoption speed to 10 years or more on this year's Hype Cycle.

User Advice: The reason user-centric IAM is so important is that, in the education community, where many students and staff are exchanged every year, it is important to be prepared to open up IAM solutions beyond organization-centric IAM and federated IAM. New trends come quickly to education through new students. Expectations of being able to use already established personal identity attributes, as well as provide verification for newly gained attributes in new contexts (such as with a vendor offering student discounts or employers offering internships), are likely to be high.

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Consumer-facing organizations should monitor user-centric IAM evolution for potential convergence or separation among disparate frameworks such as ICA, OAuth and OpenID. The emergence of identity providers supporting one or more of these frameworks for higher-risk transactions is a sign that these frameworks are gaining momentum and should be considered for institutional use.

OpenID can be used for low-assurance applications and OAuth has potential as a more secure authorization protocol. However, none of these technologies solves the fundamental identity (attribute/claim) proofing issue. Enterprises with Microsoft-centric development shops should expect that their ICA (more specifically, the current products Windows Identity Foundation and ADFS 2.0) and the claims-based identity paradigm will still be ingrained in future Microsoft products and online services.

Business Impact: The promise of user-centric IAM is that, if a standardized ecosystem of claim assertions is established, there will be a quick, cost-efficient and trusted way to grant access to services. This then means that the variation of "roles" can be expanded "indefinitely," providing more relevance and accuracy for both consumers and providers of services. For an extended discussion of the benefits, see "Governments Need to and Can Play a Role in the Online Claims Ecosystem." A true claims ecosystem, with an established risk and legal framework, has the potential to reach a "high" benefit rating for education.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: CA Technologies; IBM; Microsoft; Novell Recommended Reading: "Three Paradigms of IAM in Higher Education: Description, Trends and Lessons Learned" "Governments Need to and Can Play a Role in the Online Claims Ecosystem"

Mobile-Learning Low-Range/Midrange Handsets Analysis By: Nick Jones; Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Mobile-learning (m-learning) or learning administration applications use basic and enhanced phones. Such handsets range from ultra-low-cost devices capable only of voice and SMS, selling for under $20, to more-capable handsets supporting Web browsing and Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) retailing at up to $150. M-learning encompasses a very broad range of applications, including, but not limited to, media delivery (e.g., audio and video), exploratory learning using augmented reality, educational games, collaboration and project work, e-books, surveys, tests, data gathering, real-time feedback and simulations.

We separate m-learning on basic and enhanced handsets from m-learning on high-end smartphones, such as iPhones, because these will tend to be used in different ways, by different students and in different markets.

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Technologically, low-end handsets can deliver m-learning in several ways. For example, this could be by using: (1) very simple technologies, such as SMS — e.g., for health education; (2) server-side technologies — e.g., the mobile Web or, in some cases, using the handset just as a voice channel to listen to lessons broadcast from a server; (3) more-capable handsets that support stored media, such as podcasts or video; (4) native m-learning applications specially developed for low-end handsets and preloaded by the manufacturer — e.g., Nokia's Life Tools; and (5) simple applications developed using widely available tools, such as Java ME. One of the challenges that determines mlearning application architecture in emerging markets is that data communications to a handset are often weak (e.g., general packet radio service [GPRS] or SMS) and sometimes unavailable.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Examples of low-end m-learning deployed in 2010 and 2011 include simple tests and exams (e.g., vocabulary tests for students learning a new language) and health education. Some low-end m-learning is delivered as a service predominantly for markets in the developing countries — for example, Nokia's Life Tools in India and China, and Urban Planet Mobile's ringtone-based language learning in Indonesia. There are examples of services for more mature markets, such as the U.S., where more-innovative companies have developed SMS-based SAT prep as a subscription service exploiting the ubiquity of SMS functionality. Some K-12 institutions prefer low-end devices, as they provide access to learning objects, while minimizing the exposure to the "full featured" Internet the way smartphones do.

However, the latter point might not hold up as Moore's law will benefit low-end m-learning during the next five years, and the handset capability available at a given price point will continue to rise, enabling low-end and midrange handsets to deliver more-sophisticated m-learning. Larger screens and the falling price of color screens will particularly benefit low-end m-learning.

User Advice: The real change to a curriculum must be based on near 100% availability of a tool for the students. Educational organizations where students own primarily low-end and midrange handsets should experiment with m-learning technologies and systems that match these devices.

M-learning on lower-capability devices will be particularly important in emerging markets.

Business Impact: Organizations such as network operators and handset manufacturers in emerging markets, where few devices still are smartphones, should explore the potential of educational services and applications delivered on low-range to midrange handsets. Organizations such as agricultural cooperatives that need to distribute information to large numbers of individuals owning low-end handsets should also explore m-learning techniques. Subscription m-learning services are a potentially interesting model for network operators and others in emerging markets, because the low price points are outweighed by the large potential number of learners.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent Sample Vendors: Bharti Airtel; McGraw-Hill; Nokia; Urban Planet Mobile Recommended Reading: "M-Learning Opportunities and Applications"

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"Cool Vendors in Education, 2011"

Social-Learning Platform for Education Analysis By: Marti Harris Definition: A social-learning platform is an extension of traditional systems for learning management and learning content management that incorporates social software features to support structured social and informal, as well as formal, learning activities. The platform supports learners' desire to receive learning as needed.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: As awareness of the impact of informal and structured social situations on learning grows, students, faculty members and researchers are expecting social software features to support collaborative learning environments. Vendors are adopting product development strategies that are social-learner-centric, while educational institutions are exploring how best to use new social software options. A social-learning platform is emerging and expectations are high. Educational institutions are reviewing their current learning environments to tap into the collective knowledge of all members of their communities, and to increase their organizations' capacity to learn formally and informally. They also acknowledge the importance of social networks and the requirement to access the expertise of colleagues inside and outside the institutions.

User Advice: Institutions that have a single-purpose learning system installed should engage with their current vendors to understand the product development road map for enhancing systems with social software features. If their current vendors do not have plans for adding these features, or if the time frame for development is too long, then institutions should look for solutions that can be easily integrated into their learning architectures. Solutions already in place, such as content management, collaboration and communication, should be considered for use as well as solutions procured specifically for learning purposes. Educational institutions that do not have systems for learning and content management, or that are looking to consolidate multiple learning applications, should add support for a social-learning platform as an important evaluation criterion.

Business Impact: The social-learning platform gives learners the abilities ability to: establish a presence, or social profile, that reflects their expertise and interest; create, discuss, share and capture learning content as learning objects; organize and find learning objects from a variety of sources, such as search or peer ratings; interact with peers in their social networks and be able to reach beyond their networks to other trusted sources of information; engage in experience-based learning exercises; and receive real-time online coaching and support.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Blackboard; Desire2Learn; Google; Instructure; Microsoft; Moodle; Pearson (LearningStudio); Sakai

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Recommended Reading: "Gartner Higher Education E-Learning Survey 2008-2009: Poised for the Next Step?"

"Gartner Higher Education E-Learning Survey, 2008-2009: OSS Momentum Continues, but Is Not Alone in Changing the Market"

Media Tablet Analysis By: Van L. Baker; Angela McIntyre; Roberta Cozza Definition: A media tablet is a device based on a touchscreen display (typically with a multitouch interface) whose primary focus is the consumption of media. Examples of media include Web pages, music, video and games. The device can also facilitate content entry via an on-screen keyboard or a supplementary device such as a keyboard or pen. Future iterations may also incorporate gesture and voice controls. The device has a screen with a diagonal dimension that is a minimum of five inches and may include screens that are as large as is practical for handheld use, roughly up to 15 inches. The media tablet runs an operating system that is more limited than, or a subset of, the traditional fully featured operating systems, such as Mac OS X or Windows 7.

Alternatively, it may be a closed operating system under the control of the device manufacturer; examples are Android and Apple's iOS 4. The media tablet features wireless connectivity with either Wi-Fi, 3G or both, a long battery life, and lengthy standby times with instant-on access from a suspended state. Examples of media tablets are the Apple iPad, the Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Position and Adoption Speed Justification: It is tempting to assume that with the success of the iPad that the media tablet is at or near maturity, but this is not the case. While competitive tablets have not enjoyed much success to date, we believe that other manufacturers are committed to this hardware platform and will continue to improve their offerings. The success of the tablet form factor has been primarily in the consumer market, and it is just beginning to capture the attention of the business market. This alone will contribute to sustained hype for some time to come.

Additionally, this device category has disrupted the consumer personal computer market, with the greatest impact being on the mini-notebook (netbook) segment. The media tablet offers an attractive alternative to mini-notebooks and ultra-thin and light notebooks for consumers that are focused on content consumption. Additionally, the content creation capability of media tablets is improving. Its instant-on capability and long battery life make it a screen of convenience that appeals to consumers.

The rapid growth of tablet applications has contributed to the success of the tablet market. The success of the e-book and magazine reader applications for tablets has significantly altered the ebook reader market. The media tablet capabilities for content creation, such as photo and video editing as well as productivity applications, have improved dramatically in the last year, making the device more practical as a general-purpose tool. This trend is expected to continue. Given the high profile of the tablet category in the press and the resultant hype, the media tablet may move through the Hype Cycle quickly.

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User Advice: Enterprise IT architects should prepare for media tablets to continue to gain traction in their employee base as the devices increase in popularity with consumers. In many cases, these devices have already entered the enterprise with their consumer employees. IT managers should apply the managed diversity model for these devices. Media tablets should also be considered for business-to-consumer applications for delivering content, providing high-quality graphics in sales situations and/or driving customer engagement where it is required for navigating through marketing materials. During the next three years, media tablets will be used in business mainly for customer-facing roles — for example, by sales (to give presentations to clients), by realtors and by executives. The adoption of tablets that run a full version of an OS, such as Windows 7, and other PCs with touch will be stifled by the lack of productivity software that incorporates touch in ways that significantly enhance the user experience or improve productivity. This is due to the lack of a multitouch-centric user interface in the mainstream operating systems.

Business Impact: The adoption of multitouch technology in both the smartphone and media tablet categories has elevated multitouch use models to mainstream devices that consumers carry every day. Additionally, the availability of instant-on access has driven strong adoption as consumers have come to place a high value on this feature. The proliferation of multitouch and instant-on capabilities in tablets and smartphones will put additional pressure on the PC industry to offer multitouch and instant-on functionality in mini-notebooks and notebooks. This disruption of tablets in the market has put an emphasis on industrial design that was lacking in the market before the arrival of the media tablet.

Manufacturers of consumer electronics need to broaden their efforts to address the full user experience and avoid focusing on hardware features as they develop tablets for the market.

Consumers have shown that they are much more concerned with usability and software that is well designed for use with a multitouch tablet environment than they are with hardware features.

Manufacturers should avoid products designed on existing mainstream operating systems that are ill suited for use on a multitouch system.

The adoption and use of multitouch media tablets in addition to smartphones are disruptive to the overall computing industry, including product design centers, software, security and user interface design. With the most commonly used consumer devices driven by simple user interfaces with touch controls and instant-on capabilities, the pressure on the traditional personal computing market to move away from mouse-and-keyboard-centric designs will increase. PC manufacturers will increase experimentation with controls, such as gesture and voice, in addition to multitouch.

Media tablets, in conjunction with smartphones and cloud-based services, have the potential to fundamentally change personal computer use models in the longer term. This impact extends beyond the user interface to application design and product design, with increased expectations for additional performance and a more appealing industrial design aligned with consumer aesthetics.

Benefit Rating: Transformational Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent Sample Vendors: Apple; Dell; Lenovo; Motorola; Samsung

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Open-Source Middleware Suites Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Open-source higher education middleware suites are collections of middleware needed to integrate software solutions on campus. They include functionality such as identity and access management, enterprise service bus, and workflow.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: A "plug and play" software integration foundation is something for which institutions have strived for decades, leading to many more-or-less trendy approaches, of which service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the latest incarnation. Alongside commercial "closed source" options for the components of an SOA platform, the higher education community has run several high-profile open-source software (OSS) projects, of which the Jasig uPortal and the National Science Foundation (NSF) middleware project have been among the most visible. Both projects have affected the market in a positive way. uPortal did it mainly by "trough pushing" the adoption of Web services standards, and by providing a neutral service delivery platform for vendors such as SunGard Higher Education. The NSF middleware project produces the Federated Identity and Access Management (FIAM) solution, Shibboleth, which is used by the majority of identity federations in the academic world.

These single-purpose middleware OSS projects have now been complemented by an OSS middleware suite approach, which has its roots in the community source foundation models represented by Sakai and Kuali. Both foundations decided early on to have an SOA design approach, and, consequently, a number of middleware components have become crucial to their success — especially in the case of Kuali, where the seamless integration of a number of administrative applications is a major goal. It is, therefore, only a natural consequence of these needs, together with the Kuali Foundation's knack for marketing, that we saw the first release of the OSS higher education middleware package named Kuali Rice on 30 September 2009. Kuali Rice is composed of identity management, enterprise workflow, enterprise service bus, enterprise notification and an application development framework (Kuali Nervous System). The aggregation approach of several existing components, together with the community source model, merits a rather high entry and speed rating on the Hype Cycle. However, the complexity of middleware in itself adds a certain level of uncertainty to the project as well. The project has had steady progress, and a sign of its relative maturity is that a few institutions have adopted Kuali Rice without any plans of using any other Kuali components. Some uncertainty lingers; however, the relative success has forced the project to revise the road map to include larger changes, which merits a shorter move on the Hype Cycle than anticipated to just past the peak, but still on a rather steady trajectory to maturity. The next major release, 2.0, is planned for 3Q11.

User Advice: Middleware can be a complex business that takes careful consideration in designing.

The simple fact that it sits in the middle of a lot of information streams makes it hard to exchange, and these solutions tend to be long-lived. Therefore, it is crucial to choose solutions that are as flexible as possible by adhering to standards (open as well as de facto) that are as future-safe as they can be. OSS projects have a good track record in implementing open standards, and as we saw above, they can even drive standards adoption. Therefore, open-source higher education middleware suites should, at least, be on shortlists when comparing with commercial options to test

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vendor openness. However, Kuali Rice is not the only OSS project with an SOA aim. There are a few less marketed alternatives (see "Case Study: Approaching the Learning Stack: The Third-Generation LMS at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya").

Business Impact: Kuali Rice is still in its early days compared with older and more complete suites from vendors such as Oracle and IBM; however, the characteristics in terms of more general functionality and global need of middleware relative to, for example, learning management systems or enterprise resource planning platforms, make it a good candidate for the sustainable global OSS community. At the very least, it can help push open standards, which can be a foundation for a plug-and-play Web services approach that will promote the coexistence of many delivery modes, as well as business models, with its open and objective platform.

There is already a precedent for creating a common platform, or at least a reference platform, the way Shibboleth did, working together with Liberty Alliance to influence the development of the SAML 2 standard.

An added benefit of the OSS middleware suite is its relatively lightweight approach to middleware compared with commercial options. The lightweight nature combined with the lack of upfront investments allows institutions to start implementing quicker and to gain maturity in a crucial institutional capability.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Kuali Foundation Recommended Reading: "Open Source in Higher Education, 2008" "OSS Administrative Solutions in Higher Education Are Becoming More Viable" "Overview of Kuali Administrative OSS Offerings for Higher Education" "Case Study: Approaching the Learning Stack: The Third-Generation LMS at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya"

Web-Based Office Productivity Suites Analysis By: Michael A. Silver; Tom Austin Definition: Office productivity suites are generally collections of basic productivity applications for tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet manipulation and presentation graphics. Traditionally, suites such as Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org are fat-client applications that require millions of bytes of installed code maintained on users' PCs. The Web paradigm enables personal content creation and editing support services to be provided, using a rich-client experience that does not require explicit delivery and maintenance of the software on individual PCs by the enterprise. New

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features, such as real-time collaboration, may also be enabled. Real-time collaboration enables multiple people to simultaneously edit the same section(s) of a single document, typically keeping track of (and almost instantly showing) changes made by every contributor in the document.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Although some products in this market also offer hosted email, here we consider only the productivity functions, such as word processing and spreadsheets. Office productivity products have been available on the Web for more than four years. These applications generally do not approach the level of functionality of full-function, fatclient suites (such as Microsoft Office); however, they usually provide a smaller, task-specific function set. Google Apps for Business (GAB, formerly GAPE) is being adopted, largely for Gmail, but customers usually experiment with Google Docs for certain users. Microsoft's Office 2010, includes a Web version (Office Web Apps) that maintains good compatibility with Microsoft Office, but with a much smaller feature set than the installed fat-client version. Office Web Apps is free for consumers, but enterprises must purchase full Office 2010 Standard or Professional Plus licenses to get access to Office Web Apps. It is not available for purchase separately, though it will be available as part of Microsoft's Office 365 SaaS offering.

Individual users have been using free, consumer-grade versions to augment, rather than replace, functionality in traditional office suites (such as for real-time collaboration). Offline functionality has been limited, but features continue to be added by all vendors, sometimes on a weekly basis. At least 20 vendors offer some type of Web-based productivity suite, with Zoho and Adobe's Acrobat Online as additional examples. As functionality improves, Web-based office productivity applications will make the traditional versions of Microsoft Office relatively less important, as users rely on the Microsoft products for less time each week.

User Advice: Web-based products are not an adequate replacement for Microsoft Office for all users, and will not be anytime soon. However, some users do not need the richness of Microsoft Office, and for them a Web-based product may suffice. The critical issue is determining who can survive with Web-based tools, who requires installed Microsoft Office, and whether the complexities involved in supporting Web-based suites and locally installed versions of Microsoft Office simultaneously are worthwhile. Google Docs will challenge installed versions of Microsoft Office in enterprises where a substantial proportion of users can get their jobs done without Microsoft Office, especially in organizations that select Google to host email. Additional features of Web-based products, including ease of coauthoring, could help attract users away from traditional suites.

There are four areas to test regarding user segmentation. Web-based suites may suffer compared with installed versions of Microsoft Office in feature richness, roundtrip fidelity, extensibility and offline operation: ■

Feature richness — Users that require a large number of features or the more advanced features of Microsoft Office may not be able to run an alternative product.

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Round-trip fidelity — With any alternative product, every time a document is edited with a product other than the one in which it was created, inconsistencies are introduced, especially with visual fidelity.

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Extensibility — Many organizations run multiple applications that integrate with Microsoft Office. Office is a development platform, and few independent software vendors integrate with alternative office solutions.

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Offline operation — Web-based products offer varying degrees of offline capability. Users that are not deskbound will require offline capability (or ubiquitous network access) before a Webbased product can replace Microsoft Office.

Audit the degree to which other applications (such as CRM and ERP) provide Microsoft Office macros or integrate with Office to facilitate interacting or integrating with those applications via an Office tool. Determine what Office application user segments do not require the use of those functions.

End-user experimentation with these tools is taking place. Give your users guidelines on practicing safe experimentation (whether at work or not). Encourage them to share their findings with you, including their best and worst practices. Appoint a champion of freeware (and software as a service) to track these trends, and ensure that the enterprise experiments with and implements such software, where appropriate.

Business Impact: A new generation of productivity applications could significantly change how users collaborate on projects, and how organizations pay for, deploy and manage office productivity services. Web-based products provide access from a greater variety of devices, and organizations may be able to offload the maintenance of these applications.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Adobe; Google; Microsoft; Zoho Recommended Reading: "Toolkit: Segmenting Users for Alternative Office Productivity Software" "Microsoft Office: Buy It or Use It From Office 365 'in the Cloud?'"

"When to Consider Alternatives to Microsoft Office" "The State of Google Apps"

Cloud HPC/CaaS Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Computing as a service (CaaS) or cloud high-performance computing (HPC) in higher education deals primarily with on-demand delivery of moderate to massive computing power for education and/or research purposes.

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Position and Adoption Speed Justification: CaaS or cloud HPC is a natural extension of grid computing for many higher education institutions, and some grid-computing implementations border on the concept of the "private cloud" even today. Many institutions also collaborate in the HPC area and have already established "shared-service clouds." This means that cultural acceptance for CaaS is likely to be high. Further advantages include the classic "cloudonomics," such as electricity and cooling savings, pay as you go, and rightsizing, as well as the usual drawbacks in issues around intellectual property (IP) protection, privacy, backup and so on. The most interesting effect is how CaaS is increasing the availability of HPC to smaller institutions, and even to students. The interest is on a high level, and several institutions are including especially cloud HPC in their sourcing strategies. Altogether, this merits a relatively advanced position even past the peak on this year's Hype Cycle, as well as a quick adoption speed.

A good example of the impact on the education community is North Carolina State University's use of an IBM cloud to extend its Virtual Computing Lab concept (see http://vcl.ncsu.edu). This shows how a virtualization effort that is designed to meet students' and researchers' needs could easily be extended into the cloud, increase availability and decrease costs. Initial calculations based on 7 million HPC CPU hours and 300,000 non-HPC hours in 2008 indicated that a CPU hour cost of $0.27 could be reduced to $0.10 to $0.15 per CPU hour. The fact that some of the grants available are still used to "advance cloud computing itself" shows that we are still at near-peak behavior.

User Advice: To move to CaaS, institutions need to understand their current total cost of ownership (TCO) and risk level, and they must conduct due diligence to check up on the intended provider (irrespective of it being a nonprofit shared-service consortium or a commercial vendor) on such issues as IP, privacy, security, storage and backup. CaaS options are most valuable for institutions that face special circumstances, such as short-term projects, variable computing demands and limitations in power grids (such as in downtown London). Institutions that are involved in CaaS often, but not always, need to combine it with storage as a service. One capability that is likely to rise in importance with CaaS is network technology, which reduces latency and improves security.

Business Impact: The impact on higher education is potentially transformational because it puts more computing power in the hands of more students and researchers. The convenience factor is high and will probably lead to increased collaboration around computing-intensive research and education. If CaaS can also be combined with subject-specific services, such as Gaussian as a service (for molecular calculations), and support from parallelization expertise for optimizing the code for the cloud, then it has the potential to speed up research cycles and increase accessible data volumes tremendously.

Benefit Rating: Transformational Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Amazon.com; Google; IBM; Microsoft; Obsidian Strategies

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Sliding Into the Trough EA Frameworks Analysis By: Philip Allega Definition: This profile is not focused on single EA frameworks (we are tracking 88 publicly known frameworks) or the concept of an EA framework. This profile focuses on the aggregation of hype concerning all EA frameworks that are offered in the marketplace for use by EA practitioners and EA programs. The content and structure of specific EA frameworks vary significantly from one another.

Based on client inquiries and discussions, we find that approximately 80% of our clients are using multiple EA frameworks for inspiration and guidance. No universal EA framework exists in the market, and the hype surrounding all EA frameworks is only beginning to decline.

Gartner classifies EA frameworks in the following categories (Note: These are only examples, not a list of all possible frameworks.): ■

Academic: Academic frameworks seek to teach best practices associated with the use and deployment of an EA framework, but they are not expected to be widely adopted or implemented. The Nightingale-Rhodes Enterprise Architecture Framework is an example, as well as the notion of EA management patterns as supported by the Technical University of Munich.

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Public sector: These are government derivative frameworks designed for public-sector consumption. Examples include the U.S. government's Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF), the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the Nederlandse Overheids Referentie Architectuur (NORA).

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Defense: Defense entities have created their own approach to creating and implementing EA. Such examples include the U.S. Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF), the U.K. Ministry of Defence Architecture Framework (MODAF), and Délégation Générale pour l'Armement's Atelier de Gestion de l'Architecture des systèmes d'information et de communication (AGATE).

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Industry-specific: Outside of government or defense, a well-known industry-specific EA framework is the enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) for the telecommunications industry.

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Vendor-specific: Commercial vendors also support their own approaches to EA. The Oracle EA Framework (OEAF) and the SAP EA Framework are common examples.

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Consortium: A consortium is a cooperative arrangement between groups, individuals, businesses or institutions. Common examples include The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and the Enterprise Architecture Body of Knowledge (EABOK), a guide to enterprise architecture produced by Mitre's Center for Innovative Computing and Informatics.

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Consultancy: Many commercial consultancies create, maintain and use their own EA frameworks during EA engagements. Examples include Capgemini, Logica and Atos Origin.

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Homegrown: End-user organizations also create their own EA frameworks to guide the process of creating and categorizing EA artifacts and their use. Examples include General Motors, Intel, Allstate and the London Underground's TRAK.

An EA framework addresses the process of creating the artifacts that illustrate the structure of an enterprise; the interdependencies and interrelationships of viewpoints (for example, business, information, technological and solution); and their fitness level relative to the current, target or future, and transitional states in light of business objectives, requirements or capabilities.

Not all EA frameworks include a process for the creation and implementation of the artifacts and their use. EA taxonomical models that represent the structure and relationships of the enterprise must be complemented by a process that supports artifact creation and consumption. The use of the term "framework" to indicate both a process for creating, using and governing EA and a taxonomical structure for the artifacts it creates continues to confuse many EA practitioners today.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Although approximately 80% of EA programs use an EA framework — indeed, the majority use more than one — we must caution that the variability in content and advice within the body of knowledge in each EA framework indicates that this profile's maturity is deemed as adolescent because: ■

Uptake of different EA frameworks has grown beyond the early adopters of initial EA frameworks.

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New entrants into the marketplace illustrate different beliefs as to how the process of EA should evolve, and how EA artifacts should be defined and categorized.

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There continues to be customization of EA frameworks to support the needs of EA practitioners and their EA programs.

We have placed this entry at post-peak 30%, with the expectation that the understanding and acceptance of a common language and recognized artifacts and processes to the creation and implementation of EA are more than 10 years away from the Plateau of Productivity. Our reasoning for this position and adoption speed is as follows: ■

The myth that there can be one EA framework to solve all the needs of an EA program has only recently been exposed as false. Use of multiple EA frameworks by our clients indicates that EA practitioners are beginning to get weary of the hype associated with individual EA framework claims of being "the one" that will deliver EA value.

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The speed of universal consolidation remains slow, given that barriers to entry remain low and market participants are rewarded commercially. Market participants who monetize the use of particular EA frameworks in the marketplace have little, or no, incentive to change their perspective.

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Market forces of commoditization have yet to shake out the universal elements of EA frameworks, yet commoditization is inevitable.

User Advice: Our research indicates that each of these is best viewed as inspiration to EA programs rather than aspiration, to be followed in exacting detail. We find that most organizations

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leverage a combination of frameworks by picking and choosing the elements, artifacts and practices that are the most important to reflect their business, IT and cultural needs.

Gartner recognizes that the existence of EA frameworks has been helpful in the adoption and implementation of EA programs. The proliferation of EA frameworks and their vociferous supporters have, unfortunately, been a deterrence to successful EA programs that have a positive impact on their organization. Our advice continues to be: ■

Realize that any particular EA framework should provide a consistent organizing structure for architectural concepts and should not simply be followed as a rigid process or set of rules.

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Evaluate framework choices early in the EA process. Weight the criteria according to the priorities of your enterprise.

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Choose source frameworks quickly, recognizing which one is primary as an input to the development and categorization of your EA artifact and your EA program.

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Modify and enhance the framework, as required, to support your EA program.

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Review and modify your framework periodically to ensure that it continues to meet your needs.

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Do not attempt to follow a single framework rigidly. Its job is to provide a consistent organizing structure for architectural concepts, and it should be used pragmatically.

Business Impact: The existence of so many EA frameworks reflects the state of understanding of what EA means to EA practitioners. Those involved in promoting the concept, profession and recognition of what EA should mean to practitioners are shaped by market forces seeking commoditization and standardization of a common language, approach and terms of art to reference the concept of "enterprise architecture." Gartner marks the "birth" of the first "EA framework" to have occurred in John Zachman's seminal IBM Systems Journal article in 1987, "A Framework for Information Systems Architecture." Although it is now more than 20 years later, the low barriers to entry in the creation of a framework are evidenced in the ease with which they can be created and offered to the market.

The diversity in EA frameworks today reflects the monetization of market participants as practitioners seek a recognizable common language, process and artifacts to support EA programs.

The challenges to EA framework consolidation or universal adoption are exacerbated by the existence of EA certification efforts that acknowledge an understanding or demonstrated prowess in a particular body of knowledge that may include one or more EA frameworks. It is in the best commercial interests of those making money from certifying a particular framework to continue their claims that their particular EA framework is "best." Market participants are not yet rewarded by adhering to a commonly accepted language, process or artifact to support EA. Our observations and research indicate that the hype of the term "EA framework" is more prevalent than market adoption and penetration of specific EA frameworks as exact recipes to an EA program's success. EA programs should continue to use caution in the selection and use of any one particular EA framework, seeking those parts of EA frameworks that support the scope and focus for their EA program today.

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Benefit Rating: Low Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent Sample Vendors: Accenture; Atos Origin; Capgemini; Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence (EACOE); Logica; MIT; Sogeti; The Open Group; Zachman International Recommended Reading: "Understand How Methodologies Evolve Into Standards to Achieve Service Excellence" "Ten Criteria for Choosing an External Service Provider for Your EA Effort" "Toolkit: Selection Matrix for an Enterprise Architecture Framework" "Enterprise Architecture Frameworks: Just Choose One and Use It" "Architecture Framework Debates Are Irrelevant" "Clarifying the Difference Between Engineering and Architecting"

Open-Source Financials Analysis By: Ron Bonig Definition: Open-source higher education financial applications are developed via open-source or community source models.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Open-source solution financial projects have the potential to be part of a nonproprietary and highly customizable, higher education administrative application suite or a best-of-breed financial solution. Process, integration and support issues are beginning to find their form, but still need to prove themselves on a larger scale. The Kuali Financial System (KFS) is executing well on its road map, and a major milestone was reached with Colorado State University's and San Joaquin Delta College's successful implementations of KFS 3.0 in 2009.

The traditional strong points of open-source software (OSS) with readily available support (provided there is critical mass of skill in the community) proved to be true. However, now that the initial hype and "new project enthusiasm" have subsided, it is crucial that the Kuali Foundation can maintain momentum and critical mass in relation to expected growth. A critical milestone in the survivability and future of KFS has been passed with the Foundation's successful initiative to partner with an ecosystem of for-profit vendors that can offer support to the development effort, as well as provide sustainable and professional support services.

The community source software movement keeps maturing, and the commercial-support ecosystem is expanding. Interest in OSS, in general, continues to be high, and successful marketing from the Kuali Foundation, in particular, continues to draw interest and results in the overall expansion of the modules in the Kuali suite. All are good indicators of continued progress toward a sustainable community. We are waiting for the inevitable implementation and/or maintenance failure

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that will bring that frustrating experience to the Kuali Foundation, but that will be crucial for maturing the OSS project and moving it past the Trough of Disillusionment. KFS and Kuali Coeus (KC) are still the most mature examples in this OSS administrative suite, and they are moving faster than other modules at the moment. Altogether, this results in another relative leap this year on the Hype Cycle for OSS Financial Systems, relative to OSS Student Information Systems (SISs), of which only one module, Curriculum Management, has been released to the public.

User Advice: Open-source solutions for financials are still at an early stage, and they should be monitored as a possible fit only for institutions that are capable of supporting in-house application development, as well as those that have no pressing need to change their solutions. When this is the case and the institutions have homegrown systems, they might consider joining the opensource community to see if they can contribute and prolong the lives of their current systems or replace them with the OSS version altogether. Institutions outside the U.S. should observe how national regulation and local accounting best practices affect the need for customization and maintenance. Smaller institutions and institutions outside the U.S., in particular, should watch for signs of a sustainable market for commercial-support providers if they contemplate an OSS financial solution.

With this large and complex OSS undertaking, it is critical that institutions have a development OSS culture, software development and maintenance experience to draw on to keep risk levels under control.

Business Impact: The area of financial administration and the areas of financial integration with other administrative applications will be affected, but, as a whole, they will have a limited effect on the core mission of the institution's education and research. However, the benefit may increase if the Kuali Foundation continues to collect functionality that is very specific to higher education, such as grant management, through Coeus and the Library Management project Open Library Environment. The main factor in KFS adoption to date has been the reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) vis-a-vis a commercial offering. The Kuali Foundation has begun work on and is seeking further partners to assist in the development of the Kuali People Management for the Enterprise (KPMR) module. It will be years, however, before such an addition to the Kuali stable will be ready.

An interesting effect that the popular OSS and community source projects have is to put commercial vendors under pressure to increase openness toward standards and flexibility in their migration paths by offering an alternative to the previously rather homogeneous market.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Kuali Foundation Recommended Reading: "Open Source in Higher Education, 2008" "Gartner Higher Education Sourcing Survey 2009: What, How, How Much and Attitudes?"

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E-Textbook Analysis By: Bill Rust; Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: E-textbooks are defined as content that is delivered electronically on user devices.

Unlike traditional print materials, e-textbooks can be edited to include up-to-date information, be assembled or disassembled to rearrange the sequence or to include content from other sources, offer multimedia representation of information and instructional exercises, and allow users to insert personal notes or diagrams as study aids.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The momentum toward the adoption of e-textbooks comes from: (1) educators' view of digital content as a means of staying current in content areas and of keeping students engaged in learning activities; and (2) an increasing number of relatively inexpensive, small form-factor devices (personally or institutionally owned) that are available for deployment in educational settings. State education agencies, such as California in the U.S., have mandated or are considering requirements to replace print with digital content, and publishers are racing to get to market first. Single-purpose devices that serve as content readers for digitized text were in the vanguard, but e-textbooks on multipurpose devices (that is, with productivity and communication/collaboration tools) are more attractive options in the eyes of education technology leaders and pave the way for accelerated adoption.

User Advice: The business case for e-textbooks becomes stronger as the capital cost of user devices decreases; support and infrastructure resources are put in place; and current content providers offer economic licensing agreements or get pushed aside by content providers willing to do so. Primary and secondary technology leaders should partner with curriculum planners to develop a business case that includes replacing print with e-content deployed to personally owned or assigned student devices. Institutions of higher education are likely to see wider adoption first in the use of e-textbooks that are electronic forms of print versions, because of the wider availability of applications for user devices and because the content selection process will not require change.

Business Impact: E-textbooks will become the preferred content delivery mechanism throughout public and private education agencies and institutions. School organizations that provide text resources to students will be relieved of the liabilities of physical inventory, storage, distribution, repair (rebinding) and replacement because of loss. The conflux of decreases in device cost, the availability of multiple device form factors that can put e-textbooks in the hands of users, and consumer adoption of similar technologies are driving adoption.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Amazon.com; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; McGraw-Hill

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Mobile-Learning Smartphone Analysis By: Nick Jones; Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: We address mobile-learning (m-learning) or a learning administration application using smartphones (i.e., handsets with an identifiable OS capable of supporting installable applications).

M-learning encompasses a very broad range of applications, including, but not limited to, media delivery (e.g., audio and video), exploratory learning using augmented reality, educational games, collaboration and project work, e-books, surveys, tests, data gathering, real-time feedback and simulations.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: By year-end 2011, smartphones will constitute 26% of all mobile device shipments, growing to a range of 60% to 80% in mature markets, such as Western Europe, in 2013. Advanced smartphones, such as the iPhone, have already been used for educational purposes. As smartphones become more capable and more numerous, their ubiquity, sophisticated features and flexibility will make them preferred m-learning tools in mature markets, even if media tablets in different formats are gaining ground. There is a form-factor-for-function competition that will segment the m-learning market in the foreseeable future. For example, some K-12 teachers simply reject smaller screen size phones for reading, while other institutions embrace smartphones as replacements for clickers just because of their size. Although a wide range of mlearning applications has been demonstrated, the domain is the subject of pilot testing — to understand what type of education is best delivered on mobile devices and how to integrate mlearning with traditional education. Through 2012, emerging smartphone applications, such as augmented reality viewers, smartphone e-book reader applications and scriptable mapping tools, will offer new delivery platforms for educational content. In the long term, technologies such as flexible screens will enable a wider range of portable m-learning devices. Inhibitors in 2010 included the immaturity of the domain, smartphone cost, device limitations, development of m-learning course material, lack of skills and the wide diversity of mobile devices. Data from 2010 indicates that although 99% of students had a mobile phone in the developed countries, only about 50% had a smartphone. A major inhibitor for any large curriculum changes and programs looking at leveraging smartphones is that schools still have to include a strategy for providing smartphones to students.

Through 2014, we expect that platform differences will impact m-learning delivery technologies on smartphones. Content delivery tools, such as Flash or Silverlight, may not be available on all platforms, for example. Certain types of innovative applications may evolve more quickly on moreopen platforms, such as Android, which impose fewer technical and commercial restrictions on developers.

Higher education system providers for administrative and learning systems are increasingly offering mobile applications, which is evidence of financial commitment from these providers to meet the requirements of the end users of higher education institutions. Android, iPhone and iPad applications from higher education providers are increasingly expected.

Altogether, the lack of full ubiquity among students and increasing understanding of problems of supporting a diversity of OSs, together with different form factors, lead Gartner to position mobile

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learning on smartphones on a steady trajectory toward the Trough of Disillusionment and retain a five- to 10-year time to the Plateau of Productivity.

User Advice: Many educational institutions have experimented successfully with some form of mlearning. Educators should look for simple applications that can deliver educational material or assist staff and students with administrative tasks, such as assignment reminders and booking resources. Educational institutions have the opportunity to increase the accessibility of learning content that not only better supports problem-based pedagogy, but also leads to better usage of "dead time" (for example, while commuting). The latter convenience is greatly appreciated by parttime learners, which tends to increase students' satisfaction and retention.

Business Impact: Corporations and governments should explore the potential of m-learning for just-in-time training. Organizations and educational institutions creating or selling training and reference materials should explore the potential of mobile devices as delivery channels.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Apple; Blackboard; OutStart; Tribal Software Recommended Reading: "M-Learning Opportunities and Applications" "Market Insight: Worldwide Opportunities for Consumer Mobile Applications in Education and Learning" "Forecast: Mobile Devices, Worldwide, 2008-2015, 2Q11 Update"

Lecture Capture and Retrieval Tools Analysis By: Marti Harris Definition: Lecture capture and retrieval tools are two sets of complementary tools often presented as a suite. Lecture capture tools perform live recordings of a lecture, including voice and relevant visual material, in as complete a manner as possible. Lecture retrieval tools aid the student in retrieving the whole lecture, or the parts of the lecture relevant to their learning needs.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Although several proven solutions are on the market and more institutions send out requests for proposals (RFPs), the breakthrough in adoption as an enterprise solution is not yet here. However, the successful adoption within discipline-specific programs and departments continues to shorten the time to broader adoption. Teacher push-back and system complexity continue to impact the speed of adoption.

User Advice: User acceptance is key to deployment, in terms of functionality and instructors' acceptance of being recorded. Pilot implementations with thorough evaluation and stakeholder involvement are a must. Evaluation must include: (1) ease of use and convenience; and (2) ease of

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deployment, as well as search/indexing and "playback" functionality for students. Beware of the social and behavioral issues with these solutions. Initially, faculty are not accustomed to being recorded or of the preparation time to teach with this tool. Faculty support must be addressed seriously. However, it can be expected that younger generations (both faculty and students) will become increasingly accustomed to peer-created content and realize that recorded lectures should not be compared with Hollywood production standards. Expectations will then focus on the learning qualities, rather than the production qualities.

Consider statistical functions helping to monitor student usage coupled to, for example, student result and student retention. Seek a solution that can be integrated with e-learning platforms.

Consider software as a service (SaaS) solutions to minimize storage implications.

Business Impact: Lecture capture and retrieval tools have been shown to have some positive effect on student grades and retention, and they promise to be important pedagogical tools. The ability to index lectures and the ability to offer playback of selected passages have proven key to these positive results. However, they are just two of many tools that are needed, and they can never replace good teaching. They can only extend its reach. Practical benefits include review, improved scores, improved retention, convenience, and a new option for students to make up planned or unplanned absences.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Accordent Technologies; Cisco; Echo360; Panopto; Sonic Foundry; Tegrity; Winnov

Unified Communications and Collaboration Analysis By: Jeffrey Mann Definition: Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) describes the combination of communications capabilities with collaboration technologies. Until fairly recently, the technologies and vendors for enterprise communications and collaboration were fairly distinct, with telephony and networking product vendors comprising the former and software companies like Microsoft and IBM dominating the latter. That cozy distinction has eroded dramatically because Microsoft and IBM offer voice and telephony features, and vendors like Cisco have moved into the collaboration market. In most organizations, those IT staff responsible for managing and defining the needs of collaboration tools are different to those managing and defining the needs of communication tools.

Unified communications (UC) is a closely related term, describing a similar phenomenon, where communications technologies extend into some areas of collaboration, either by integration or by offering those capabilities directly.

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blended into a mix that includes email, Really Simple Syndication feeds, social networks, calendars, blogs, tasks, wikis, personal profiles and discussion forums.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: As UCC represents the merging of formerly fairly distinct marketplaces, there is a lot to work out before it can be considered well understood or mature. The current period sees vendors jockeying for position to gain influence over end users, leading former partners increasingly to become fierce competitors. Vendors add functionality to their product suites, which overlap or compete directly with other products brought in-house for completely different reasons. For example, Microsoft's Office Communications Server is used primarily as an instant messaging platform, but also includes voice, telephony and Web conferencing functionality, features that many organizations have already acquired from other vendors. They must decide whether to accept the overlap, drop the incumbent supplier or integrate it.

Over the past decade, disparate organizational functions have been merged together in a sometimes turbulent mix, with either two disparate IT sub-departments or an IT department (typically charged with collaboration and end-user productivity) and the communications infrastructure group (responsible for telephony and networking) being restructured into a single operating unit. End-user organizations are coming under pressure as IT sub-departments responsible for communications increasingly conflict with the people responsible for collaboration.

We regularly hear customers complaining, "Why are they bringing in new voice services when we already have that covered?" or conversely, "Why won't they let us use the cool facilities built into these tools?" These tensions will have to be resolved and new market "norms" will need to be established before it becomes clear what the balance will be between UC and UCC in the marketplace.

Collaboration vendors will have a hard time meeting the quality and robustness of traditional communications vendors as they add these capabilities to their products, just as communications vendors are finding it a challenge to understand user interface issues and how people work. For the moment, seamless UCC remains an aspiration for most suppliers. However, the potential benefits of UCC make it a worthwhile exercise. Shifting seamlessly between a variety of communications and collaboration modalities increases productivity and end-user satisfaction. Consumerization is also driving user expectations in this area. Facebook, Skype and Yahoo can mix communications and collaboration, so why can't enterprise vendors?

User Advice: Ensure that the different IT sub-departments involved are aware of each others' plans and are communicating effectively. Creating a joint task force to develop a UCC strategy made up of communications, network and collaboration people, as well as representatives from management and lines of business, has proven to be effective in reducing interdepartmental friction.

Evaluate whether users need or even want the new capabilities. UCC capabilities often sound fascinating, but sometimes can be a "solution looking for a problem." Ensure that the organization will benefit from the new capabilities in concrete, preferably measurable ways. Resist the temptation to deploy capabilities just because they are included in the next upgrade. Introducing UCC too quickly could outstrip the ability of end users to assimilate the changes in work processes and even

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simple tasks. Communicating and collaborating are fundamental to most business processes. Do not mess them up for end users with unwanted complexity and unnecessary change.

To become more familiar with the possibilities and prove the value of UCC, first look for groups of users who already understand the potential benefits and business cases which provide the clearest path to a measurable return. These test cases can help build the case for more widespread deployment.

Business Impact: Users expect to be able to employ an integrated set of collaboration tools, escalating to the highest value combination of interactive services — both inside and outside the firewall, and including fixed and wireless networks — for the business task at hand. Presence services will be a vital unifying tool, enabling users to right click on a name and invoke a variety of collaboration mechanisms. Shared team spaces will provide temporary and persistent repositories for interactions. These capabilities will be available as a complete stack from several vendors, which currently only provide point solutions, as they expand their offerings. Standards-driven integration will make even more combinations possible, beyond relying on a single vendor's product stack.

The value to organizations will be realized in several ways. First will be the simplified and more effective use of the increasingly broad range of collaboration and communication options. Second will be the improved ability of individuals and groups to accelerate reactions to market events. Third will be the efficiency gains via the contextual embedding of communication services into applications at points where, for example, process disconnections occur and human intervention is necessary.

Identifying the potential value of UCC is easy. What organizations will struggle with is quantifying the benefits and calculating returns on investment. Companies may need to eschew traditional return on investment mechanisms and look for alternative, less quantifiable means to justify UCC investments, such as process cycle acceleration, faster problem remediation, increased information awareness and the inclusion of more internal and external resources in planning processes.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Cisco; Google; IBM (Lotus); Microsoft Recommended Reading: "The New Market for Unified Communications and Collaboration" "Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Instant Messaging and Presence" "Key Issues for Unified Communications, 2011"

Hosted Virtual Desktops Analysis By: Mark A. Margevicius; Ronni J. Colville; Terrence Cosgrove

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Definition: A hosted virtual desktop (HVD) is a full, thick-client user environment, which is run as a virtual machine (VM) on a server and accessed remotely. HVD implementations comprise server virtualization software to host desktop software (as a server workload), brokering/session management software to connect users to their desktop environment, and tools for managing the provisioning and maintenance (e.g., updates and patches) of the virtual desktop software stack.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: An HVD involves the use of server virtualization to support the disaggregation of a thick-client desktop stack that can be accessed remotely by its user. By combining server virtualization software with a brokering/session manager that connects users to their desktop instances (that is, the operating system, applications and data), enterprises can centralize and secure user data and applications, and manage personalized desktop instances centrally. Because only the presentation layer is sent to the accessing device, a thin-client terminal can be used. For most early adopters, the appeal of HVDs has been the ability to "thin" the accessing device without significant re-engineering at the application level (as is usually required for server-based computing) .

While customers implementing HVDs cite many reasons for deployments, three important factors that have contributed to the increase in focus on HVD: the desire to implement new client computing capabilities in conjunction with Windows 7 migrations, the desire for device choice (in particular, iPad use), and the uptick in adoption of virtualization in data centers, where this is now more capacity for virtualized systems and greater experience in the required skills. Additionally, during the past few years, adoption of virtual infrastructures in enterprise data centers has increased (up from 10% to 20% to about 40% to 70%). With this increase comes both a level of maturity and an understanding of how to better utilize the technology. This awareness helps with implementations of HVD where both desktop engineers and data center administrators come together for a combined effort.

Early adoption was hindered by several factors, one main one being licensing compliance issues for the Windows client operating system, but that has been resolved through Microsoft's Windows Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) licensing offerings. Even with Microsoft's reduced license costs for Windows OS (offered in mid-2010, by adding it to Software Assurance), enabling an HVD image to be accessed from a primary and a secondary device for a single license fee, other technical issues have hindered mainstream adoption. Improvements in the complexity of brokering software and remote-access protocols will continue to occur through 2011, extending the range of desktop user scenarios that HVDs can address; yet, adoption will remain limited to a small percentage of the overall desktop installed base.

Since late 2007, HVD deployments have grown steadily, reaching around 6 million at the end of 2010. Because of the constraints previously discussed, broad applicability of HVDs has been limited to specific scenarios, primarily structured-task workers in call centers, and kiosks, trading floors and secure remote access; about 50 million endpoints is still the current target population of the total 700 million desktops. Through the second half of 2011 and into 2012, we expect more-general deployments to begin. Inhibitors to general adoption involve the cost of the data center infrastructure that is required to host the desktop images (servers and storage, in particular) and network constraints. Even with the increased adoption of virtual infrastructure, cost-justifying HVD implementations remains a challenge, because of HVD cost comparisons to those of PCs.

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Additionally, availability of the skills necessary to manage virtual desktops is also an ongoing challenge. Furthermore, deploying HVDs to mobile/offline users remains a challenge, despite the promises of offline VMs and advanced synchronization technologies.

Through 2011, broader manageability of HVD VMs will improve, as techniques to reduce HVD storage volumes lead to new mechanisms for provisioning and managing HVD images by segmenting them into more-isolated components (including operating systems, applications, persistent personalization and data). These subsequent manageability improvements will extend the viability of HVD deployments beyond the structured-task worker community — first to desk-based knowledge workers, then to new use cases, such as improved provisioning and deprovisioning, contractors, and offshore developers.

HVD marketing has promised to deliver diminishing marginal per-user costs, due to the high level of standardization and automation required for successful implementation; however, this is currently only achievable for persistent users where images remain intact — a small use case of the overall user population. As other virtualization technologies mature (e.g., brokers and persistent personalization), this restraint will be reduced. This creates a business case for organizations that adopt HVDs to expand their deployments, as soon as the technology permits more users to be viably addressed. Enterprises that adopt HVDs aggressively will see later adopters achieve superior results for lower costs, but will also need to migrate to new broker and complementary management software as products mature and standards emerge. This phenomenon is set to further push HVDs into the Trough of Disillusionment in late 2001.

User Advice: Unless your organization has an urgent requirement to deploy HVDs immediately for securing your environment or centralizing data management, wait until late 2011 before initiating deployments for broader (mainstream) desktop user scenarios. Through 2011, all organizations should carefully assess the user types for which this technology is best-suited, with broader deployments happening through 2012. Clients that make strategic HVD investments now will gradually build institutional knowledge. These investments will allow them to refine technical architecture and organizational processes, and to grow internal IT staff expertise before IT is excepted to support the technology on a larger scale through 2015. You will need to balance the benefits of centralized management with the additional overhead of the infrastructure and resource costs. Customers should recognize that HVDs may resolve some management issues, but they will not become panaceas for unmanaged desktops. In most cases, promised reductions in total cost of ownership will not be significant and will require initial capital expenditures to achieve. The bestcase scenario for HVDs continues to be for securing and centralizing data management or for structured task users.

Organizations must optimize desktop processes, IT staff responsibilities and best practices to fit HVDs, just as organizations did with traditional PCs. Leverage desktop management processes for lessons learned. The range of users and applications that can be viably addressed through HVDs will grow steadily through 2011. Although the user population is narrow, it will eventually include mobile/offline users as well. Organizations that deploy HVDs should plan for growing viability across their user populations, but they should be wary of rolling out deployments too quickly. Diligence should be employed in testing to ensure a good fit of HVD capabilities with management infrastructure and processes, and integration with newer management techniques (such as

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application virtualization and software streaming). Visibility into future product road maps from suppliers is essential.

Business Impact: HVDs provide mechanisms for centralizing a thick-client desktop PC without reengineering each application for centralized execution. This appeals to enterprises on the basis of manageability and data security.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent Sample Vendors: Citrix Systems; NEC; Parallels; Quest Software; Red Hat; VMware

Open-Source Learning Repositories Analysis By: Marti Harris Definition: Open-source repositories are digital repositories built on open-source software for sharing of digital media and content. They include multiple formats of digital types and are available either by institutional ownership, by subscription or by the institutional membership in a consortium.

Faculty and students can use the repositories for peer-review content and to submit content for consideration.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: A number of the open-source repositories connect to the most prevalent learning platforms and can be referenced by users when building course content or learning/studying materials. Open-source repositories can allow for the exchange of content and experiences in the larger education community. Progress on standards will cause the pace of adoption to pick up, but faculty culture is still not attuned to reusable, object-level content. Even sharing of traditional course content within a department is not as prevalent as it could be. Perhaps the competitiveness of the tenure process leads to, in effect, the copyrighting of the learning content. Learning repositories will give way to digital content repositories that are not for the sole purpose of holding learning content as more and various types of content will be incorporated into learning. Open-access repositories allow for the acceptable use of shared digital content between members of academic communities and will continue to need both IP and IDM management, which enable the use of open-source repository software.

User Advice: Consider open-source repositories to increase the performance of content access within a learning platform. Look for repositories with a track record of higher education integration with learning platforms. An open-source e-learning solution interfaced with a consortium-driven elearning repository would be a powerful and economical solution for higher education institutions.

Assess the willingness of faculty members and researchers to participate in open-source repositories, and identify barriers that may be removed early in these types of projects.

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Business Impact: Affected areas include instruction, learning space, research, and library management. With the continued rising cost of higher education, shared resources that are available through open-source repositories may provide improved ROI by making content and collaboration more accessible.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent Sample Vendors: Alfresco; DSpace; Eprints; Fedora; MERLOT

Virtual Environments/Virtual Worlds Analysis By: Marti Harris Definition: Virtual environments or virtual worlds are online platforms in which participants are immersed in a three-dimensional representation of a virtual space.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The topic of virtual worlds has diminished in higher education circles. General-purpose use of environments like Second Life has not proved interesting enough to hold the attention of most educators. However, real successes continue in virtual worlds, not for the purpose of creating virtual re-creations of real environments, but rather for the purpose of creating experiences that can take place only in virtual environments. Most of the virtual campus tours did not prove to be worth continuing, whereas simulations that can be staged only in a virtual environment continue to grow with experiential subject appeal.

Second Life, although still used, has given way to other virtual platforms that have proved more functional for simulations and experimentation. Educators express concern regarding the strength of Linden Lab to continue Second Life development. OpenSimulator has increased activity on its platform, especially for migrating Second Life content. Projects such as Duke University's Open Cobalt (funded in part with National Science Foundation grants) represent continued interest in and development of virtual worlds. The future successes of virtual environments will pull from both gaming and simulation. In these two areas, faculty members have high hopes.

User Advice: Use the "try before buying" strategy when available, experimenting with proven virtual environment platforms where other institutions have a measure of success. Organizations such as the New Media Consortium (www.nmc.org) are a place to find real application developments and uses. Expect continued growth of educational gaming and simulation. Encourage faculty and students to sample and explore. Expect simulation and gaming to find a place in the learning stack as subject-specific elements.

Business Impact: There will be effects on analysis, student performance, productivity and agility for knowledge transfer processes, teaching/learning and research support, decision support, training, R&D, intellectual capital management, and innovation.

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Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Entropia Universe; Linden Lab; Multiverse; Open Cobalt; OpenSimulator; SAIC

Global Library Digitization Projects Analysis By: Marti Harris Definition: Global library digitization projects are massive organizational initiatives that make research library collections globally accessible.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The massive size of such a project means that implementation could take a decade, and publishers continue to express concern that copyright interpretation of "fair use" could continue to delay progress. In addition to the legal issues, the global financial problems continue to have a negative effect on funding for such large, long-term projects, slowing their progress. However, the need for access online, rather than through more traditional interlibrary loans or travel for on-site use of core collections, makes projects of this type promote increased return on investment. The technology to support the digital library projects is mature, but the process of including large collections is long, labor-intense and continues to face copyright issues. Expect that any single academic global project will be replaced by federated access through growing individual and consortium library projects.

User Advice: These projects will deliver great academic value, but they are so large that technological changes must be expected during the span of project life cycles. Commitments to specific technologies could prove shortsighted. Continued academic library involvement in consortia and subject-specific digital collections is an important project and can contribute to larger global projects.

Business Impact: Affected areas that will benefit from access to large digitalized libraries include instruction (including student access to library digital content), research, library collection development and e-learning.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent Sample Vendors: Google; Yahoo

Emergency/Mass Notification Services Analysis By: Roberta J. Witty; John Girard; Jeff Vining Definition: Emergency/mass notification services (EMNSs) are focused on the electronic activation and management of notification messages to groups or individuals — disaster recovery teams,

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employees, citizens, residents, students/parents, customers, suppliers or government officials — and are critical for managing a crisis and streamlining an organization's mass communications capability. The service can be used to organize contacts into an unlimited number of groups or subgroups, to send emergency messages (for example, announcing fires, power outages, natural disasters, severe weather conditions, volcanic ash events, terrorist attacks, hostage crises, bridge collapses, child abductions or criminal activities), to track receipts or responses for message delivery confirmation, and to perform workforce and citizen disaster relief management. Activation can be accomplished by logging onto a Web portal; accessing the system by a telephone or by calling the vendor's call center; and then securely sending a custom or previously crafted message to multiple endpoint devices, such as phones, PDAs, desktops, email systems, fax machines, physical security systems, public announcement systems and, increasingly, to social media networks. EMNS software can send thousands of messages to endpoint devices simultaneously.

However, there is no guarantee that the person to whom the endpoint device belongs actually receives the message due to human behavior factors, as well as delays in the vendor's and national telecommunications infrastructure being used.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Critical incidents today range from localized events, such as a fire or power outage, to regional and catastrophic disasters such as earthquakes (such as in Chile, Haiti and Japan), hurricanes/tsunamis (such as in Indonesia and Japan) and terrorist attacks (such as in Mumbai and London, and on 9/11). They don't have to cause major physical damage in order to have a major business interruption — for example, the 2010 Iceland volcanic ash event and the 2009 and 2010 H1N1 virus. As a result, organizations are increasingly implementing EMNS, thereby building a stronger crisis management program. The EMNS market was growing fast in 2008 and 2009, with median revenue growth of 37% and 29% for 2008 and 2009, respectively (deals already in the pipeline), but then it slowed to an estimated 7% due to the 2008 recession. Revenue for 2010 is estimated at $610 million. Our first EMNS MarketScope focuses on enterprise-level offerings and has an overall rating of Positive. In this year's Hype Cycle, we position EMNS ahead of its 2010 position by two spots — showing more but measured progress due to the 2008 recession.

Organizations are recognizing that they can use EMNS for more than emergency/mass notification purposes, with the following being the six main use cases: 1.

Emergency/crisis events that require stakeholder notification (workforce, customers, partners and so forth)

2.

Business operations notifications, such as workforce management roll call or mustering, callouts to parents for absentee students, upcoming and special event announcements, important meeting reminders, and so forth

3.

Business context-based alerting that gets triggered from another business process (for example, checking account overdraft, late payment, flight delays, work availability options by locale — "Send Work Now," grade delivery, incoming injured patient and so forth)

4.

IT service alerting

5.

Reverse and enhanced public emergency call numbers (for example, 911 and E-911 in the U.S.)

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6.

Public safety (for example, student tracking on a college campus)

Organizations will expand their use of these offerings, thereby driving down the cost, and making these offerings feasible for the smallest of organizations.

No vendor has an offering that supports all use cases. The EMNS market addresses the first, second and third messaging use cases, with emergency/crisis event alerting being the primary reason for the use of these tools. Given the business evolution of a few of the EMNS vendors, some have their use cases and associated message volume just the reverse — business operations and context-based alerting are the primary uses of their tool. At present, there is some vendor overlap between the EMNS and communications-enabled business process (CEBP) markets (see "Hype Cycle for Enterprise Communication Applications, 2010") through an EMNS product application programming interface (API) for integration to a triggering business application.

Gartner forecasts a growing relationship between the EMNS and CEBP markets within the next five years as alerting and notification of all kinds become routine. Many firms use multiple products to address all their alerting/notification needs. In some cases, these firms are looking to consolidate their vendor portfolio; however, when it comes to alerting that is triggered from a business application, it is not always possible to consolidate because of the complexity of the integration between the business application and the EMNS tool.

User Advice: Review Gartner's "MarketScope for Emergency and Mass Notification Services "to understand the EMNS market before you start your own implementation. Use Gartner's EMNS RFP template ("Toolkit: Emergency/Mass Notification RFP Template") to develop your own EMNS RFP. Vendors focus on the following main markets: higher education (K-12 vendors specific to this market are not covered in the MarketScope), healthcare, government and private enterprise — regulated and not. Choosing a vendor that has experience in your market will result in a morealigned offering to your business operations.

Customers prefer a subscription-based or hosted solution, which means that the software and hardware necessary to operate the EMNS system are located off-site and accessed via a Web portal, desktop API or handheld device. Decide which approach is best for your own operations and security/privacy needs.

EMNS pricing is competitive, but pricing models vary. Most are based on the number of contacts in the contact database, plus additional charges for message volumes per endpoint. Email messages tend to be unlimited; phone messages can be restricted to a certain volume and price point; and proprietary SMS messages are priced like a mobile phone call. Enterprise deals remove most of these restrictions.

Review and examine the types of use cases for which you will be using EMNS. Knowing all of the usage can help in product selection, as well as understanding pricing quotes among the vendors.

Some EMNS vendors use resellers, such as telecommunications companies, to resell their products. For customers looking to expand their use cases beyond emergency notification, these

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resellers might be of interest, because some have an EMNS offering with unlimited messaging for all endpoints. However, the price may be beyond what some firms are willing to pay.

Government organizations should not, for the sake of redundancy, opt to use multiple EMNS vendor technologies, because, when activated in unison, they have the potential to overload servers. Some of these systems can be linked to a geographic information system map interface to develop a more targeted approach, such as a certain postal code or a neighborhood within a certain radius of a chemical spill.

Carefully plan your enrollment procedure to ensure that all people needing to be contacted are included in the service and that their contact information is current and complete.

Carefully plan the types, number and content of notification messages because: Recipients of notification messages may ignore notices if too many are sent about the same event.

Carrier-based character restrictions on text messaging make the formation of a meaningful message a challenge.

During a regional disaster, don't overload the telecommunications infrastructure with needless messages.

No vendor can ensure or guarantee message delivery — all they can prove is that message volume levels are leaving their system. EMNS prospects and vendors need to set realistic expectations regarding message volume for each endpoint — phone call, email, SMS and so forth — and in the aggregate.

If you want 24/7 availability of a service — and if the vendor has a business interruption such as a disaster, scheduled maintenance that runs over time, unscheduled maintenance and so forth, and a documented service-level agreement to go along with it — then you must validate your needs against the EMNS vendor's capability and delivery of that capability. At times, you might have to contract for it in addition to what the vendor provides in its base offering. EMNS users should apply a holistic analysis to SLAs and look for potentially unrecognized factors.

Business Impact: The interest in and need for EMNS tools continue to grow among governments, private enterprises (regulated or not), educational institutions and operators of critical infrastructures. The use of EMNS reduces overall costs by consolidating functions and improves the capability to deliver and update uniform message delivery to targeted and mass groups. The business benefits of using an EMNS tool include: ■

Many key personnel can be notified in minutes.

■

Management can focus on critical decision making and exception handling, instead of message delivery.

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Human error, misinformation, rumors, emotion and distraction, so often found during a crisis, are eliminated from automated EMNS communications.

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A documented notification audit log can be provided for real-time and post-event management.

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Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Amcom Software; Amtelco; AtHoc; Benbria; Blackboard; Cassidian; Cooper Industries; Emergin; Enera; Everbridge; Federal Signal; FirstCall; Global AlertLink; MIR3; NY-Alert; Omnilert; Rave Mobile Safety; ReadyAlert Services; Send Word Now; SpectraRep; SunGard Availability Services; Twenty First Century Communications; Varolii; W.A.R.N. Recommended Reading: "MarketScope for Emergency and Mass Notification Services" "Toolkit: Emergency/Mass Notification RFP Template" "Research Roundup: Business Continuity Management and IT Disaster Recovery Management, 3Q09" "Toolkit: Requirements for Crisis Command and Emergency Operations Centers" "New York Projects Show Critical Need for Unified Emergency Management" "Q&A: How Universities Can Notify Students of a Crisis" "Case Study: City of Chicago and ChicagoFIRST Public-Private Partnership"

SaaS Administration Applications Analysis By: Ron Bonig; Bill Rust Definition: Software as a service (SaaS) for administration applications in education is software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. It's based on a single set of common code and data definitions that are consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers at any time, on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on use metrics.

Application service provider (ASP) (aka "hosting") models differ from SaaS in that the solutions are owned by the customers, but hosted and managed by vendors, using their experience and expertise.

Educational administrative applications that may be delivered through SaaS include major solutions, such as student information systems (SISs), finance and HR software, federal financial aid calculations, and point solutions, such as substitute teacher notification and assignment systems.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: SaaS is still a relatively foreign solution strategy for education at all levels. Primary and secondary school agencies, however, are attracted to the model by its economies of scale and speed of deployment, as well as the growing recognition that the business requirements schools once thought were unique to their particular organizations can be met without a custom (or customized) solution. This is a general insight among higher education institutions, as levels of interest in SaaS are high, especially in the community college sector.

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However, research-intensive institutions still seem to consider the business requirements and their capacity to meet them unproven.

In the higher education environment, SaaS is gaining ground, along with business process outsourcing (BPO), in the area of financial aid processing. SaaS offerings for the federal financial aid calculations — formulas that change yearly — are very practical and play to SaaS's strong suit: There's a single instance of regulations to update, with many users paying by the application to have the approved and validated calculations performed, relieving them of the yearly update to that portion of their higher education ERP systems.

In its truest form, SaaS deployment has been slowed, to some degree, by consumer agencies and vendors that have confused SaaS with ASP opportunities, as well as by existing shared-service strategies. For example, a local education agency looking to meet ERP requirements through SaaS may find that the responding providers come back with an ASP proposal that is configured or customized for the customer and licensed as if hosted by the school agency.

Barriers to adoption include cultural proclivities and legal concerns. The culture of education, especially K-12 education, shows a demonstrated preference for customized and/or self-built solutions. Legally, state, local and federal requirements for locating stored data or for the public disclosure of business practices that SaaS providers consider a competitive advantage can delay, if not stop, the implementation of a SaaS solution. However, adoption is expected to accelerate, especially in primary and secondary education, where common business requirements will be driven by accountability mandates from federal levels of government, as will be the case in higher education in the very regulated area of financial aid. The recognition of SaaS as a form of cloud computing also brings attention and a degree of acceptance to SaaS solutions in this market.

User Advice: Best practices for considering administrative suite requirements are re-examining needs, and considering process and technology change to meet business requirements. Build business cases to satisfy these business requirements that comprise the ongoing total cost of ownership for the range of solution models, including SaaS. The key decision will often be reduced to balancing calls for customized, highly enterprise-specific requirements — and the costs that accompany them — versus the opportunities that may be offered through SaaS or other shared deployment models. Keep in mind that SaaS applications are a form of cloud computing, and that the true test of deploying SaaS is the capacity to deliver your established performance indicators.

Business Impact: SaaS offers school organizations the opportunity to identify and concentrate on analyzing and using essential data without saddling them with the hardware, software and staffing requirements that accompany enterprise-hosted solutions. Educational agencies and institutions that don't view their data requirements as unique will adopt SaaS. Those that do not see a common solution — and are willing to pay for the perceived critical differences between themselves and similar organizations — will not adopt SaaS. Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent

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Sample Vendors: SunGard Higher Education; TopSchool

Climbing the Slope 802.11n Analysis By: Tim Zimmerman; Michael J. King Definition: 802.11n is the latest wireless LAN (WLAN) standard ratified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Improvements in the technology have expanded the throughput and range that can be implemented in 2.4GHz or 5GHz. A single spatial stream operating in a 20MHz channel width can achieve 75 Mbps, compared with the 54 Mbps of a similar 802.11a or 802.11g solution. Dual-stream radios providing 300 Mbps at 5GHz using the bonded channel functionality are common in the market, and several vendors have introduced three-stream radios that can provide up to 450 Mbps. Theoretically, 802.11n is expected to deliver as much as 600 Mbps of networking performance using four spatial streams, but actual performance will depend on each vendor's implementation. Additionally, the performance of 802.11n in clients may be limited to less than the capacity of the infrastructure by the specific implementation, such as the number of antennas that are integrated into the device. Like previous 802.11 standards, 802.11n provides for a 20MHz channel width to enable backward compatibility with 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g (a/b/g) standards on the market.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Since the ratification of the standard, the market movement to 802.11n has been swift. Many vendors continue to report that more than 70% of new access points being purchased are now 802.11n, although they continue to be purchased for different architecture considerations — autonomous versus coordinated, controller-based versus in the cloud, or with one, two or three integrated radios within the access point.

User Advice: IT leaders should consider 802.11n for all their WLAN requirements, because there is no longer a premium to be paid, in comparison with 802.11a/b/g components. The number of radios within an access point, as well as the number of spatial streams supported and type of multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) support needed, will be determined by the enterprise WLAN requirements, including capacity and level of service. Vendors will still have points of differentiation that will not only improve wireless network performance in terms of capacity and robustness of communication, but will also create the need for use case testing, because implementation choices will affect data, voice and video applications.

Business Impact: 802.11n should be considered for all wireless LAN scenarios as mainstream adoption of the technology in small, medium or remote office environments, as well as in higher education and healthcare, continue to drive the technology deeper into the enterprise. IT organizations that have answered the call to implement wireless for conference rooms and reception areas can tackle the additional hurdles (such as voice over WLAN [VoWLAN]) that are impeding the implementation of 802.11n across the access layer. We believe that 802.11n will enable sufficient bandwidth and required capabilities (such as quality of service) for enterprises to

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consider moving not only data, but also voice and video for many enterprise applications to the WLAN. Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Aruba Networks; Cisco; HP; Motorola Solutions Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Wireless LAN Infrastructure" "Toolkit: Technology Section of a WLAN RFP" "Toolkit: Checklist for Building a Solid WLAN Access Layer" "Critical Components of Any WLAN Site Survey"

Intellectual Property Rights and Royalties Management Software Analysis By: Mike McGuire Definition: Intellectual property rights and royalties (IPRR) systems — a class that includes intellectual property rights management (IPRM) — enable rights holders to index and associate specific business rules (including distribution rights information) with each piece of content under their control. We are focusing this Hype Cycle entry on the content industries, but it is important to note that IPRR as a class includes the areas of patents, as well as applications in the pharmaceutical, IT and education sectors.

These systems help the monetization of content via multiple distribution channels. They have various uses, such as exhibition or licensing in any number of ways, including use in other copyrighted works (for example, a song being used for a movie soundtrack) by, in effect, enforcing the multiple contractual requirements inherent in the creation and exploitation of copyrighted material. These platforms often run in parallel with or loosely tie into royalty tracking and settlement capabilities, because a royalty payment request must be generated for each licensed use of the content. These uses will include distribution to multiple online distribution providers, incorporation with advertising, use in consumer products, or display through traditional and digital means.

Typically, the software is a component in a digital distribution value chain at a content company, and it is used in conjunction with digital asset management solutions. The IPRR/IPRM systems provide the content company with a way to track the authorization or "clearance" of the rights-in/ rights-out of a given work. To be clear, the solutions covered in this Hype Cycle entry typically do not include content protection or digital rights management (DRM) technologies (DRM has its own entry).

Ultimately, solutions should incorporate analytics to determine the relative performance of properties and integrate with finance and accounting systems for calculating royalty payments.

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There will also be a need to integrate or match up output with systems or services used to monitor compliance with the licenses that have been granted, and to identify the unauthorized use of IP. Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The shift from analog to digital assets has changed the nature of IP in the media industry. IP that used to consist of a single episode, for say a TV series, can be treated as literally hundreds of digital assets. As such, IP management systems have struggled to adapt to the changes in the nature of asset licensing. The media industry is in the early stages of digital IP management, as many companies begin to convert from manual to automated processes. While recent economic turbulence might be an explanation for why there are not more dedicated IPRM upgrades happening in the media industry, the sheer complexity these systems have to contend with is the most likely cause. Conversations with vendors and end users in the media space have highlighted the fact that neither the inherent complexity of the IPRR challenge nor the somewhat turbulent economic conditions have lessened IPRM's importance to all sectors of the media industry — quite the opposite, actually. Between the 2010 Hype Cycle and this year's version, the surge of interest in online video, online movie content and online music distribution, not to mention online book and magazine distribution in publishing, is renewing the focus of many strategists and business unit heads on the issues of licensing automation and automation of royalty payment systems. Many of the IPRR/IPRM solutions utilized by content companies are based on custom consulting/integration engagements that used proprietary tools and attempted to adapt them to the unique needs of IP management. Another whole set of these platforms has come from established enterprise software platform providers such as RSG Systems and SAP. Given this history, the IPRR/IPRM space is characterized by studios and TV networks that are in the process of either updating legacy systems or integrating them with new platforms, as well as integrating other systems (such as finance or CRM) at content companies. However, the complexity of the contracts governing the creation and distribution of movies, TV shows, books and music albums has underscored a concern that shrink-wrapped, out-of-the-box solutions are not capable of managing the challenge. As a result, vendors such as SAP have modified their strategy by enabling best-of-breed vendors, selected by the customer, of certain elements of the licensing process — for example, royalty calculations — to be integrated into the customer's platform.

However, IPRM's position on the Hype Cycle — to 25% post trough from 5% in 2010 — is an indication both of the complexity of the processes being managed and of the significant work the content industries are undertaking to develop more automated processes. Gartner believes some important developments between 2010 and 2011 show signs of the content industries' long-term intent to update licensing and license management capabilities, adding to IPRM's forward momentum. First is the establishment of the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR), an effort to develop a common content ID and registry of licensed content. Initially focusing on movie and TV content, it would provide a centralized source of licensable content — an important simplification of the way content is licensed. The second example is the project to create the Global Repertoire Database (GRD) — an EU-backed project with participants ranging from Apple and Amazon to Universal Music Publishing Group and EMI Music Publishing. The objective is to design and build a database that would track the ownership and control of musical work. Among other things, this would greatly reduce the friction in licensing by providing, in effect, a current listing of what works were available to license.

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At the core, the IPRR/IPRM market is about providing content companies with the tools needed to know their inventory — what they have a right to sell and where and when — and to track and monetize it. With the explosion of the online distribution market — from video on demand (VOD) and over-the-top video, to online distribution via online stores — demand for robust IPRR/IPRM solutions will only increase as content companies scramble to find the tools required to legally and profitably meet this new demand.

User Advice: Media companies should evaluate IPRR/IPRM solutions carefully, paying particular attention to the integration level offered for core business applications and the potential for growth.

As important is starting with a solid set of company-standard definitions for rights-in and rights-out systems. In many cases for media companies that own or control large libraries of content, this process will start with an intellectually simple but operationally challenging effort of entering in the information from the contracts of all their owned or controlled movies, TV shows, books, songs, etc.

As content portfolios grow with the conversion to digital assets, and as business model alternatives proliferate, media companies need to drive for standardization of lower-level issues such as definitions and metadata requirements for tagging content — knowing that a single piece of content can now be distributed or exploited in multiple ways — which are important requirements to fully leveraging these IPRR/IPRM platforms. Active participation, at the appropriate levels, in industry efforts such as EIDR, and for the music industry the GRD, need to be requirements for all content companies.

Business Impact: IPRR/IPRM affects IP management, sales, contract management and CRM. In contrast to businesses that are trying to protect their IP, media companies are trying to protect their assets while exploiting them across multiple distribution channels, which requires them to be able to track content usage, enforce distribution contracts and calculate royalty payments to myriad stakeholders involved in the creation and distribution of the assets.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent Sample Vendors: Counterpoint Systems; Oracle; Real Software Systems; SAP Recommended Reading: "CES 2011: TV Service Providers Regroup" "Cool Vendors in Media, 2011" "Rights Management Bottleneck an Inventory Challenge for Movie Studios"

IT Infrastructure Utility Analysis By: Claudio Da Rold; Frank Ridder; Philip Dawson Definition: An IT infrastructure utility (IU) is a shared IT infrastructure architecture provided through on-demand services. Pricing is based on service use and proven, ongoing reductions in the fixed

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baseline (or subscription fees) and unit costs. The IU is open, flexible, predesigned and standardized, as well as virtualized, highly automated, secure and reliable.

The most basic IU style is utility hosting, which has evolved from traditional dedicated hosting via virtualization. The most developed IU offerings are currently built on standard infrastructure blocks (such as virtualized computing, storage, networking), to which elements designed to support a specific application landscape — such as ERP, communication, collaboration or CRM — are added.

The client is still in full control of the customized applications, while the service provider controls and manages the operating platform up to a level below the logic of the application. The provider tailors the architecture/performance/price of the service to the application requirements; for example, billing on a per-user or per-SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) basis.

Companies such as Amazon.com (with its EC2 and S3 offerings); smaller providers such as GoGrid, Joyent, OpSource and SoftLayer Technologies; and virtual data center hosting companies, all deliver IU services that leverage a cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) approach.

Virtual data center hosting companies enable the implementation of complex virtual architectures in their physical data centers. Traditional outsourcers and small startups, such as ThinkGrid, are also introducing virtualized desktop utility services into the market. Public cloud solutions do not give enough visibility into the structure, architecture, operations and security of the global data centers or computing environments; a fact that causes compliance issues for multiple industries (such as banking, insurance and the public sector). IU solutions must close this transparency gap and enable regulated industries to leverage solutions based on this approach; this will happen through private/ hybrid, hosted cloud computing.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: During 2010, IU services (IUS) continued its impressive growth curve. In a worldwide IUS survey during early 2011, 39% of respondents confirmed that they were already users of IUS, and an additional 22% of the respondents planned adoption within the next 12 months (see "Survey Analysis: End-User Trends in Infrastructure Utility Services and Infrastructure as a Service" and "User Survey Analysis: Infrastructure Utility Services, 1Q11"). This growth is mainly driven by cost reduction opportunities, quality improvement options and the increased flexibility that IUS bring to an organization. As more vendors offer infrastructure utilities (CSC announced an IU for SAP on 9 May 2011, a few months after having announced a hybrid cloud; see "CSC Introduces the First Hybrid Cloud IaaS for Security and Simplicity"), increasing adoption and competition causes the IU market to further mature. During 2009 to 2011, strong competition between IU for SAP (IU4SAP) solutions brought down the price of this industrialized service very significantly, showing that, in many cases, the next step in industrialization will be low-cost services. Examples of industrialized, one-to-many, low-cost IT services that exist today, include virtualized servers available for $400 or less per server per month, and Infrastructure Utility for SAP, available at €5 (approximately $7) per user per month — the traditional client cost used to be five to 10 times as much (see "Behind the Cloud: The Rise of Industrialized, Low-Cost IT Services" and "Industrialized Low-Cost IT Services Drive Value, By Definition").

Across the challenging economic environment of 2009, and the uncertain climate of 2010/2011, the industrialization of the IT services industry actually accelerated. The evolution from traditional outsourcing delivery models toward cloud computing is driving innovation at an increased pace,

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and is leading to significant investments at different service layers. Many of these investments are being made in the infrastructure layer, because this is an area where technology is mature, sharing is possible, willingness to outsource is high and knowledge is widely available. Also, the ongoing discussion about cloud delivery models ranging from private to hybrid to public, and the mix of hype and fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with cloud computing, are fueling interest in IU — which is perceived as more secure and reliable than public cloud. (Marketing claims about the robustness of cloud computing are encouraging many customers to ignore vital continuity and recovery practices, leaving them dangerously exposed to service interruptions and data loss, see "Will Your Data Rain When the Cloud Bursts?" and "Managing Availability and Performance Risks in the Cloud: Expect the Unexpected.")

Most service providers have already incorporated, or are currently adding, IU solutions into their portfolios: often rebranding on-demand and utility offerings as hybrid "cloud computing." Finally, an increasing number of telco providers are adding computing to their network, and offer IaaS IUS as an alternative for colocation or hosting (see "Magic Quadrant for Data Center Outsourcing and Utility Services, Europe," "Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand)"and "Competitive Landscape: Data Center Outsourcing and Infrastructure Utility Services, Europe"). This creates plenty of choices for buyers, but also adds to the confusion; the boundaries between various IUS and cloud solutions are not always clear (see "Comparing Infrastructure Utility Services and Private Clouds"). That is the main reason why organizations should understand the seven attributes that define IUS (as described in "The Seven Golden Rules for Industrialized IU Services"), creating unique value for organizations of all sizes.

IUS are outcome-focused, ready-to-use and charged on a usage basis. Enterprises can scale their IU use up or down. IUs are also highly virtualized and shared, automated, lean and standardized.

While evaluating IU and cloud services, an organization must be aware of the potential lock-in and vendor strategies associated with private cloud implementations, and adopt the relevant emerging practices (as depicted in "Cloud Sourcing Deals Anatomy: From Public to Private, From Services to Technology Lock-In").

From a maturity perspective, we map the advancement of IU against our Infrastructure Utility Maturity Model (IUMM); see "Gartner Introduces the Infrastructure Utility Maturity Model." Leading IU providers have implemented Level 3 maturity (virtualized) and are progressively implementing Level 4, which is all about automation and will close the gap between IU and IaaS. What's stopping many service providers from running full speed into Level 4 is that an increased level of automation decreases the number of touchpoints with the client, something they currently rely on for upselling and their relationship-improvement efforts. Additionally, before automating IU providers must define their service approach in great detail, and this requires time and offerings maturity.

While some IUs, such as IU4SAP, are quite mature and still see double-digit growth rates, more complex and complete IU architectures will emerge within leading IU providers. Basic IU services (such as virtual server, storage and network) are modular and can be grouped and combined with managed services, standardization and automation to support more complex client requirements that are aligned to a specific application landscape or more broad vertical or segment-specific requirements.

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Traditional providers must continue to invest in, and further industrialize, their IT infrastructure service delivery, because new and disruptive approaches — especially those based on cloud computing — and new providers will progressively threaten the existing status of every insourced or outsourced solution. During the next five years, IUS will drive consolidation, and large providers will end up winning the market share battle — growing organically or by acquisition.

Overall, the outsourced services that are delivered through an IU approach (and that fulfill the seven traits mentioned above) have been grouped into a subset of the IT services marketplace — IUS. These services represent the provision of outsourced, industrialized, asset-based IT infrastructure managed services (below the business application functional layer). IUS are defined by service outcomes, technical options and interfaces, and are paid based on resource usage, allocation or number of users served. For this market, Gartner has created a formal market sizing and forecast (see "Forecast: Infrastructure Utility Services, Worldwide, 2009-2013"). The forecast shows that the IUS market was worth $7,101 million in 2009. By 2013 it will grow to $23,501 million, representing a compound annual growth rate of 34%. However, this will represent only 11.8% of the combined infrastructure managed services market in 2013. This clearly underlines the huge potential impact associated with the development of IUS, both on traditional and cloud-based architectures.

User Advice: IUS are infrastructure managed services delivered by an industrialized delivery model.

All clients should: ■

Gain an awareness and understanding of these new offerings in order to leverage the value for their enterprise.

■

Include IUS in the set of service options under evaluation as part of their sourcing strategy and enterprise architecture.

■

Investigate critical areas, including pricing mechanisms and demand management, architectural specifications and limits, impact on application software licenses, transition in and out, contract terms and conditions, security, compliance, auditing and risk management.

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Use the Gartner IUMM as a road map to follow the evolution of infrastructure toward the realtime infrastructure concept. This evolution will affect most organizations, regardless of their decision to transform and run their infrastructure internally (insourced delivery) or externally (outsourced delivery or IU).

Organizations delivering their IT infrastructure services in house should: ■

Regularly check how IU offerings are advancing in the market. Increasingly, these offerings will become the external benchmark for price, efficiency and flexibility. Examples include a SAP production managed platform (excluding SAP licenses) starting at under $10 per user per month (PUPM), or a Microsoft Exchange IU service at $5 PUPM. These entry-level prices represent the ongoing trend toward industrialized low-cost services (see "Behind the Cloud: The Rise of Industrialized, Low-Cost IT Services" and "Industrialized Low-Cost IT Services Drive Value, By Definition").

Organizations considering outsourcing deals or utility offerings should:

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Concentrate on pricing units and pricing schema — and on the related tools for service requests, metering, billing and financial and service reporting — to understand the maturity of offerings. The degree of flexibility must align with client requirements and the maturity of the offerings.

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Request references from other clients using these offerings and pricing units, and exercise due diligence in actively checking those references.

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Ask the provider to carefully describe the processes, automation tools and SLAs underpinning service delivery quality and efficiency, because a focus on unit definition and pricing alone is insufficient to achieve the best value for money.

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Request that providers communicate their service/architecture road map: to give an understanding of how their offerings evolve over time, and to judge the potential for lock-in into their specific architecture. Ask providers how they are moving from traditional to cloud-based IU services during the next few years.

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Understand how their sourcing life cycle (sourcing strategy, vendor selection, contracting and ongoing management) will change when embracing highly standardized solutions.

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Start piloting or using IUs as part of their IT value chain.

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Request proof regarding statements of regulatory compliance and verification of security and location transparency of data stores.

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Verify the impact of software licensing models when moving from dedicated to shared IU-based hosting solutions.

Business Impact: IT IU can: ■

Optimize the cost-efficiency and service effectiveness of IT infrastructure.

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Increase flexibility in response to business requirements.

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Deliver an open, predefined and automated platform for innovation.

To benefit, clients must overcome significant cultural, financial and technical issues such as standardization acceptance, independent software vendor pricing strategies, application portability, virtualization and policy-driven management for heterogeneous environments. Continuing economic uncertainty and the further rise of cloud-enabled services solutions will accelerate the evolution toward industrialized low-cost IT services.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Amazon.com; Atos Origin; AT&T; BT Global Services; Capgemini; CSC; Dell; Fujitsu; HCL Technologies; HP; IBM; Logica; Rackspace; Savvis; Siemens IT Solutions and Services; T-Systems; Terremark; Unisys; Verizon Business

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Recommended Reading: "Infrastructure Utility Services: The Business Between Outsourcing and the Cloud" "Infrastructure Utility for SAP: Comparing Five Leading Offerings" "Infrastructure Utility for SAP: Comparing Contract Terms and Service Levels" "Keiper: Adopting an Infrastructure Utility for Flexibility and Efficiency" "Case Study: Areva Gains IT Flexibility Through an Infrastructure Utility" "Oxea Shows How Infrastructure Utility Can Deliver Speed and Efficiency" "Case Study: How IT Utilities Support Rio Tinto's IT Dynamics and Company Moves" "Case Study: Nampac Adopts the IBM Infrastructure Utility for SAP Applications" "Comparing Cloud Computing and Infrastructure Utility"

ITIL Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an IT service management framework, developed under the auspices of the U.K.'s Office of Government Commerce (OGC), that provides process guidance on the full life cycle of defining, developing, managing, delivering and improving IT services. It is structured into five main books: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement. ITIL does not provide specific advice on how to implement or measure the success of the implementation; rather, that is something that an organization should adapt to its specific needs. ITIL has been evolving for more than 20 years. It is well-established as the de facto standard in service management, and is embedded in the formal service management standard of ISO 20000. The current release, v.3, was introduced in 2007.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: ITIL is now a well-known alternative for IT service delivery quality improvement in education institutions. The interest in ITIL is well into the action phase for many institutions — at least at a basic level — and institutions are regularly sending employees on commercially available training, as well as hiring the by now readily available "ITIL skill." Most early adopters have focused on implementing a basic level of "service desk" and "service support" capability, with processes such as change, incident and problem management in the first round, and they are now implementing the next set of processes. In this, they have gained valuable insight and a more realistic view of what ITIL can do for a higher education IT organization.

ITIL is now seen as an established quality stamp, especially for centralized IT services. Still, full implementation of all ITIL processes in an institution is rare and expected to take time (indications are that it will take an institution three to seven years, depending on the initial maturity), and is not even required to get "good enough" return on investment.

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There are some regional differences in interest, based on geopolitical pressures. For example, adoption seems to be higher in Australia and Northern Europe, but adoption has spread relatively faster in the U.S. in 2009 and 2010. In the case of ITIL, it also looks like the Trough of Disillusionment is relatively shallow, and that the almost-ubiquitous commercial training and best practices make for a smooth adoption without fuss in many IT organizations. This led to a relative leap for ITIL in education to just past the Trough last year and a smooth move into the Slope of Enlightenment this year.

User Advice: Institutions that are unfamiliar with ITIL should begin by examining the standard process framework used by ITIL. Before the institution selects process improvement frameworks and models, it must assess: (1) what the organizational scope of the improvement initiative is, and (2) whether the ultimate goal is operational process improvement or business transformation. If the goal is institution (as opposed to just IT) growth or transformation, then a more strategic approach to change will be required and other frameworks, such as Six Sigma and COBIT, are more applicable.

It is also important to recognize that most higher education institutions neither have or need to have the cultural prerequisites for attaining the highest levels of ITIL maturity. A proven tactical approach to ITIL implementation is to focus on the pain points (such as downtime) and to establish metrics that demonstrate tangible results of ITIL implementation. This approach builds momentum and credibility and will pay for itself through cost savings and improved productivity, if done well.

ITIL includes demand governance, which is well-meaning and understandable, but institutions should be careful which framework they use for higher-level governance. ITIL is best suited for supply governance, while other frameworks, such as COBIT, have more experience in strategic alignment and demand governance. ITIL and COBIT are two excellent frameworks that work well together.

Business Impact: Large and/or complex institutions will likely find greater ROI because of (1) the relative need for transparency through agreed processes and nomenclature due to many/different stakeholders and (2) the relative return on the "administrative" overhead that ITIL introduces. ITIL is particularly relevant to central IT operational services groups (running service desk, data center, campuswide networks and so on). ITIL also has a positive impact on multisourcing, where institutions and external service providers work according to ITIL. Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent Recommended Reading: "Global Standards Can Reduce the Adverse Effects of 'Administrative Freedom' in Higher Education" "Understand How Methodologies Evolve Into Standards to Achieve Service Excellence" "Toolkit: ITIL and Process Improvement Are Key Initiatives for Infrastructure and Operations Leaders" Page 70 of 97

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"There's Gold at the End of the ITIL Rainbow" "Implementing ITIL v.3: Theory Versus Reality" "Leverage ITIL v.3 to Integrate Information Security With the IT Service Management Life Cycle" "Cost Optimization: Three ITIL Processes Can Play an Important Role" "How to Begin ITIL V3 Adoption From Service Strategy the PMBOK Way" "Top Six Foundational Steps for Overcoming Resistance to ITIL Process Improvement" "How to Leverage ITIL for Process Improvement"

Mashups Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Mashup software in higher education is simply that which brings functionality and/or data together from more than one source. The more formal Gartner definition is that a mashup is a lightweight, tactical presentation-layer integration of multisourced applications or content in a single, browser-compatible offering. It is a lightweight variant of the older notion of a composite application and the heavier service-oriented architecture orchestration approach to composite applications. In the usual use of the term, mashups are composite applications that are built on enterprise platforms, are internal-facing and are not necessarily Web-based.

In contrast, the usual notion of a mashup is a Web-based application that leverages consumeroriented sites for external-facing audiences. These original notions are being blurred as mashups move onto enterprise platforms, and composite applications swivel to face outward. Even within the enterprise, mashups partly rely on data and services from public websites, such as Google Maps, craigslist, eBay, Amazon.com and others. Because mashups leverage content and logic from other websites and Web applications, they're lightweight in implementation and are built with a minimal amount of code (which can be client-side JavaScript or server-side scripting languages, such as PHP or Python). These are not fixed requirements, but reflect the original implementation of the mashup concept in Web 2.0 startup companies, which typically do not use enterprise-oriented platforms, such as Java or .NET. Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Higher education has embraced mashups, and many institutions have some applications and/or projects that use mashups. Academic and administrative applications are likely to include mashups of some form as a normal way to link data and functionality to the application. Faculty and students are comfortable with mashups from the public Web, including videos and shared content, and often are promoting the use of mashups. The use of social networking software has also increased interest and use of mashups in higher education. An important enabler for mashups is the increased focus on legal data-sharing through the work of organizations such as Creative Commons.

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This latter trend especially has meant that mashups are generally leveraged for personal productivity needs, rather than the requirements of a long-standing corporate role. This suits the academic culture perfectly. The context of mashups involves the confluence of many innovations: Web APIs, lightweight client-side scripting, delivery of content via RSS, wikis, Ajax, social networking and the explosion of Web-based communities. For a long time, the closest thing to mashup creation tools for "civilians" (users who do not write code) was an RSS feed reader or podcasting client, which enabled them to "mash" content from more than one site. That situation has improved manifold, with more-powerful tools (such as Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly and Google Mashup Editor). Mobile platforms such as smartphones and their apps have meant even quicker adoption in higher education, that is now down to less than two years, before reaching the Plateau of Productivity.

User Advice: Higher education institutions are naturally being drawn to the use of mashups through student portals, social networking software, mobile apps and academic content posted from multiple sources to course management and content management systems. Institutions must regularly review policies and practices to ensure that decisions about what institutional data or content should be locked down are made at the institutional, not individual, level and that institutional digital rights management (DRM) policies are enforced. Institutions must be prepared to make changes in practices, policies and mind-sets, which may take time to change or to get people to engage in institutional discussions. It is important to note that mashups add another layer of complexity, with regard to data or source validation. This is especially important to highlight when using external data sources and when using for educational purposes.

Business Impact: Mashups can be used effectively to bring content and functionality together with a low level of IT skills, thus improving flexibility and the time from idea to service.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Adolescent Sample Vendors: Adobe; Google; IBM; Microsoft; Oracle; Yahoo; YouTube

E-Portfolios Analysis By: Ron Bonig Definition: E-portfolios are Web-accessible repositories for student work, both graded and ungraded, which may be shared with authorized parties.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: E-portfolios have begun to move toward the mainstream, as standards and security issues are resolved by institutional policies and improved technologies. In their current incarnation, e-portfolios have a place in many institutions, but adoption is still hampered somewhat by interoperability issues. Besides the standard issue about what metadata standards to apply, there is also the more deep-rooted problem of who owns and supports the portfolio, especially in the context of lifelong learning, multiple institutions and multiple employers. Until megavendors, such as Microsoft and Google (or even Facebook), enter the market Page 72 of 97

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and offer lifelong services in the form of cloud e-portfolios (similar to their healthcare initiatives, but far less contentious), this issue is not likely to be solved, and e-portfolios will experience a limited uptake relative to the grand vision that started the movement. A partnership between SunGard Higher Education and Epsilen may help to advance the adoption of e-portfolios, at least across the large SunGard customer base.

User Advice: E-portfolios are moving from limited-access projects to institutionwide applications.

Security and reliability, as well as the validity of student-entered data, are still concerns. However, policies and flags are being established to define content that is certified by the institution as valid.

To prepare for a future of greater interoperability and extended use cases of e-portfolios through either federated or cloud solutions, institutions must evaluate the standards supported, especially from an import/export perspective.

Business Impact: Affected areas inside the institution include instruction, collaboration, assessment and student services. Areas outside the institution are potentially many, affecting student and faculty mobility, employee skill scouting, and employer searches.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: ePortaro; Epsilen; McGraw-Hill; Nuventive; Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI); TrueOutcomes

Game Consoles as Media Hubs Analysis By: Van L. Baker Definition: Game consoles have been increasing the services that they offer to include movies, television shows and other services. The positioning of game consoles as media hubs has expanded as an increasing number of consoles are connected to broadband. Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 now offer a robust set of content. The content includes movies, TV shows, short-form videos and music, as well as news and weather information. They have also added streaming content from services such as Netflix and Sony's own Qriocity. This enables the game console to combine online media content with traditional gaming content that is increasingly being delivered by the same broadband service. The earlier focus on content streamed from PCs in the home has been dramatically reduced in importance, as sourcing from the cloud has largely replaced sharing of media content via home networks.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Game consoles have become fully connected consumer electronics, with the majority of the current-generation consoles being connected to the Internet. The gamer population has moved online, with multiplayer gaming becoming the norm versus the niche that it was a when the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were introduced. Gamers are also avid consumers of nongaming content, and they are not the only users in the household that are interested in the delivery of this nongaming content. The evolution of the media services that

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deliver content to the game console has led to additional interest in the game console as a media access device for the delivery and consumption of music, television and movies. This content is rapidly migrating toward Internet streaming services, as broadband distribution of content becomes more commonplace in all households. The user interface has been improved on the high-end game consoles, and the variety of content that is available continues to grow. The Wii brought gesture and motion to the controller market and continues to evolve with the upcoming tablet controller.

Microsoft and Sony controllers have also evolved with the release of Microsoft's Kinect, which incorporates gesture controls and a camera, and PlayStation Move, which also facilitates gesture controls in the game environment. These controllers will expand in functionality beyond games and into the overall entertainment platform. The installed base is large enough that most media companies see the market as a viable one. Fully featured consoles with significant onboard storage are seeing increased adoption in response to their growing role as media hubs in the home.

User Advice: Consumer electronics manufacturers of home entertainment devices such as DVD and Blu-ray players should take note of the threat and opportunity for digital downloads to livingroom devices, including over-the-top set-top boxes and game consoles. They should target gaming households with alternative devices to prevent market erosion to game consoles. The opportunity for alternative delivery devices will continue to increase in the era of broadband-connected television. Game console manufacturers should continue to broaden the offerings for nongaming media services. It should also be noted that game console owners that use these devices as media hubs are likely to be early adopters of high-end electronics, such as 3D televisions.

Business Impact: The business impacts are incremental distribution market opportunities for media companies that target 18- to 40-year-old males. The threat that the game console facilitates is to optical media player device makers as streaming becomes the norm and physical media wanes.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience Maturity: Mature mainstream Sample Vendors: Microsoft; Nintendo; Sony

Open-Source Portals Analysis By: Jim Murphy Definition: The use of open-source horizontal portal frameworks continues to grow among higher education organizations.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Many higher education organizations have turned to open-source portal frameworks to serve their staff, students and extended communities. Balking at the high cost of commercial portal software, they often rely on the academic community for support, services and best-practice advice.

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appears to be gaining significant headway in the higher education market, by offering its software directly and by serving as the basis for third parties like Cisco, as well as cloud- and consortiumbased providers like CampusEAI Consortium. Many higher education institutions are moving away from Java-based portals to lightweight portals built on Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP)-based platforms, such as Drupal and Joomla. Although these are often characterized as content management systems, rather than portal platforms, they suffice for handling portal duties at higher educational institutions.

A renewed push into higher education among large, commercial software companies may disrupt open-source growth in the portal space. Microsoft is offering portal capability as part of its broader SharePoint platform, which includes content management, collaboration and social networking capabilities not normally included in portal software, and it integrates readily with Microsoft Office and Exchange. Similarly, often-incumbent Oracle is offering portal software as part of a broader WebCenter Suite. Portal initiatives rooted in cloud-based collaboration, in the form of Microsoft's SharePoint Online and the new Office 365, as well as Google Apps for Education, may also hamper open-source growth in this space.

User Advice: Higher education enterprises implementing a portal should consider open-source portal alternatives, but should also carefully evaluate their long-term requirements and investments in adjacent spaces, such as content management, search and collaboration. Frequently, solutions targeted at the higher education market, although based on open-source technology, are so highly customized that they become hard to extend or upgrade over time. Organizations should carefully evaluate the capabilities of open-source packages described as "portals," because many of these open-source alternatives are really lightweight Web content management or community publishing tools. Organizations considering open source should ensure that they are adequately equipped with development expertise for the chosen portal product and the development platform.

Business Impact: Relying on an open-source horizontal portal framework reduces the initial acquisition costs traditionally associated with a portal product. The trade-off may be less-thanleading-edge functionality in some areas, and an increased reliance on internal staff and peer organizations for technical support.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Drupal; Jasig; Liferay; Red Hat JBoss

Social Media in Education Analysis By: Marti Harris Definition: Social media represents Web environments where individual information is aggregated, presented and shared. Typically, applications are provided to document and filter connections between individuals, present content on profiles, support various multimedia and facilitate

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communications between people. Social media sites attract a critical mass of students to provide healthy communities and opportunities for people who are connected by events, products or demographics to develop contacts based on personal, professional and educational backgrounds or interests.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Student and alumni memberships are using social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn as well-established meeting places. Increasingly, faculty members are using social networks as the means to communicate with students. These types of networks continue to grow without any formal connection to higher education institutions. This informal use within student groups is far advanced compared with any formal institutional uses and provides institutions with a window to future student user expectations of community and collaborative tools. Official university Facebook uses include communication for social purposes, academic announcements, marketing and emergency messages. According to a 2010 study by Pearson, more than 30% of surveyed faculty members use social networks to communicate with students; nearly one-third of surveyed faculty members use social networks to communicate with peers. Learning platforms and higher education CRM solutions are including social media links within their applications.

User Advice: Although it does not pay to chase after students in their social communities, it is essential that higher education IT decision makers monitor student expectations with regard to communicating and collaborating within networking environments. This information can be used for institutional strategic planning for user collaboration, communications and the future of e-learning platforms. Since faculty and students are using social media as a means of communication and collaboration with or without the institution's acknowledgment, institutional leaders must assume faculty and students are using social media at their institutions and plan accordingly.

Business Impact: Social media may provide additional useful tools for recruiting, teaching, collaborating and marketing. Increasingly, higher education software providers will include social media as an additional communication channel.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Facebook; LinkedIn

CRM for Enrollment Management Analysis By: Marti Harris; Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Customer relationship management (CRM) systems in the higher education market are primarily used, at this time, for effectively and efficiently managing key portions of the enrollment management function. CRM in higher education is also referred to as "constituent relationship management" — a distinction without a difference. The importance of CRM in addressing institutional, market and constituent needs is now widely recognized in higher education.

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reporting and management tools, which together allow for the establishment and maintenance of student/prospect relationships throughout the enrollment cycle, and may continue into other areas of the student life cycle.

The purpose and scope of CRM are necessarily unique to every institution of higher education, as are the meaning and uses of CRM analysis. Enrollment management analysis can be clearly and consistently identified as an integral part of any institution's CRM strategy. CRM for enrollment management involves systems that are verticalized for higher education student and prospect recruiting, as well as for enrollment management functionality. Considering that the purpose of any CRM is to establish and maintain a durable relationship with the customer/constituent, the most successful systems, whether in a corporate context or in a higher education context, must necessarily interface with those customers in the manner in which the customers prefer. In higher education CRM systems, the integration of social media into these systems is a critical differentiator among the providers to meet higher education end-user expectations.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: A key obstacle is showing the value of overcoming politically inspired constituent data stovepiping. Traditionally, the enrollment/admissions function in higher education has "owned" the early relationship with the customer/prospective student.

However, the effectiveness of a CRM system is limited unless there are agreements and methods to collect all communications and exchanges between the client and the institution. These exchanges include communications with coaches, professors, advisors and housing staff. Traditional stovepipes of data must be abandoned and the integrated student life cycle CRM used in order for the institution to maximize its investment and increase client satisfaction. An effective CRM system can also help with student retention, which prevents the bleeding of revenue as students drop out or transfer. Student retention is a natural next step in the student life cycle, adding features and functionality that are specific to retention.

User Advice: CRM for enrollment management should be considered as a business unit strategy and as part of an institutional CRM strategy. Even when implemented first in a single unit or department, an institutionwide CRM strategy should be considered for any future expansion and in view of the potential savings in license, time and training. Not all enrollment and recruiting applications are CRM-based, and institutions should determine whether they seek a single-purpose enrollment management solution or enrollment management that is CRM-based. Institutions should review their SIS and ERP vendor road maps and evaluate whether the solutions that exist or are being developed or acquired will meet their future needs with capabilities that expand past the basic requirements of enrollment management.

Business Impact: Affected areas include recruiting, enrollment community relations, advancement, student retention and alumni relationships. A fully developed student life cycle CRM system should track a student from the initial contact with the institution through enrollment, matriculation and entry into alumnus status. A tighter relationship between the student and the institution pays dividends in retention, future recruitment and, ultimately, advancement. Fully functional student life cycle CRM aims for decades of relationship management, not just the limited duration of traditional enrollment management solutions.

Benefit Rating: High

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Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Datatel; EnrollmentRx; Hobsons; Intelliworks; Jenzabar; Microsoft Dynamics CRM; Oracle; RightNow Technologies; salesforce.com; SunGard Higher Education; Talisma; TargetX Recommended Reading: "Q&A: The Role of CRM in Higher Education Student Life Cycle Management"

Web and Application Hosting Analysis By: Ted Chamberlin; Gene Phifer Definition: Web hosting, which includes custom and packaged application hosting, is the outsourced management of some or all the infrastructure associated with Web-based content and applications. Customers are provided with Internet data center facilities, bandwidth, computing capacity, security and storage, as well as associated managed services. This infrastructure may be dedicated, virtualized or provisioned on a consumption basis. Typically, the hoster is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the infrastructure. In application hosting, the provider will supply dayto-day application management tasks, in addition to infrastructure management. The transfer of technical and staff assets is relatively rare, with customers tending to provide their own software licenses and hardware.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Web and application hosters have automated most of the deployment and management of the network, infrastructure and operational support in dedicated and virtualized environments, and now must look to extend this level of competence to cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments. Traditionally, customer support was inconsistent, but many have implemented formal customer satisfaction programs and use the output to change workflows (IaaS offerings will challenge customer support improvements as most environments are self- or lightly managed and supported). This movement toward "hybrid" hosting environments, where applications are hosted on a combination of dedicated and virtualized platforms, has begun to separate the leading providers from those that offer only partial solutions.

The increased interest in cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models continues to force hosting providers to develop additional complimentary service stacks where compute, storage and network are provisioned in an elastic manner, and billing is based on the consumption of resources. These usage-based services, commonly referred to as IaaS, focus heavily on server and storage; commercial enterprise application hosting continues to thrive on dedicated enterprise server platforms, but is starting to incorporate virtualization and utility compute for nonproduction architectures. As hybrid hosting offerings become more user-friendly, enterprises will start to divide applications and workloads between both dedicated and multitenant-based hosting services. This drive toward more hybrid hosting will have financial implications for the hosters in terms of not only capital investments needed to fund virtualized compute and storage estates, but also advanced automation for fabric control and for metering/billing systems.

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User Advice: Nearly all enterprises should consider external hosting in their tactical and strategic sourcing decisions, because the services are standardized, and can support the flexibility of upward and downward scaling. Not every service provider can deliver all levels of support (especially enterprise application management and utility/cloud services); therefore, we recommend defining your required level of service and support prior to engaging in a competitive bid situation.

Business Impact: Web and application hosting provide a greater reliability, scalability and technology expertise than in-house hosting for all but a few enterprises that have complex application integration needs, or whose IT operations are large enough to match the scale of a Web hoster. Web hosters typically also have higher-quality facilities, diverse carrier networks and deeper system support personnel than enterprises. However, the customer is restricted to the technologies supported by the Web hoster, and, as with all outsourcing, there may be some loss of control.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience Maturity: Mature mainstream Sample Vendors: AT&T; BlueLock; CenturyLink-Savvis; CSC; Datapipe; Fujitsu Services; GoGrid; HP-EDS; IBM; Interoute; NTT Communications; Rackspace; Secure-24; SunGard Availability Services; T-Systems; TW Cable-Navisite; Verizon Business

Entering the Plateau Organization-Centric IAM Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Organization-centric identity and access management (IAM) technologies enable institutions to manage user accounts and privileges that are under the direct control of the institution. The name was introduced last year. It relates to the need to separate this entry from those on federated IAM and user-centric IAM, as well as to more accurately position all three profiles.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Overall, IAM is necessary to enable personalized, secure and auditable access to networks, systems and data, which has become a top priority in higher education. Although recognized as a strategic infrastructure capability, implementations have been hampered by the difficulties of finding a clear-cut financial ROI. This has now been overcome by enlightened institutional leadership, or, more likely, peer pressure and implementation projects have been taking off on a large scale. The hurdle now is the inherent complexity in comprehensive, organization-centric IAM solutions, especially in a demanding environment such as higher education, where at least 20% new user IDs are needed each year, and where changes of roles are frequent. It also explains why organization-centric IAM as a whole in higher education lags the more mature area of federated IAM. Federated IAM solves a simpler process and technical problem, where IDs and attributes are already assigned (by the organization-centric IAM), using well-

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established technological standards, such as SAML, as well as metadata standards, such as EduPerson, to allow for the interinstitutional sharing of services. The challenge in federated IAM is instead interorganizational trust.

K-12 institutions have less of a hurdle in implementing organization-centric IAM due to their general centralized natures. In our most recent IAM survey, 69% of higher education respondents had implemented basic IAM, leading us to position organization-centric IAM in education as a fast mover into the Plateau of Productivity — most likely dropping off the Hype Cycle next year.

However, we are still retaining an early-mainstream maturity rating, since many institutions only implement the basic IAM functionality, leaving such things as role-based authorization for later iterations. Organization-centric IAM projects are likely to be long-term projects, with incremental improvements in functionality. Here, we rate basic functionality implementation, especially centralization of user ID management.

User Advice: IAM should be considered part of the institutional strategy for personal interaction with its stakeholders, and it should be included in the security plan. It is imperative that institutions obtain an IAM solution as quickly as possible. A key challenge for especially decentralized education institutions is overall governance and program management of IAM, which impacts all aspects of the institution. An organization-centric IAM solution, including well-designed userprovisioning and deprovisioning processes, is also a prerequisite for the full exploitation of federated services. Due to the nature of the global academic community, several federated services already exist, and many more can be envisioned if sufficient access control can be implemented.

For institutions that have significant student/faculty mobility, a federated approach using federated IAM technology can provide a significant collaborative advantage. Furthermore, since higher education institutions are such a large part of society, with many individuals passing through, usercentric IAM is also emerging as a future option and an identity layer off the Internet, with a potentially high impact. These initiatives should be closely watched.

Business Impact: Identity and identity-related attributes used for personalized e-interaction with all the institution's stakeholders are a strategic asset. A wide community, including parents, students, faculty, staff and alumni, benefits from personalized communication with the institution. Welldesigned IAM solutions that reach well outside the institution through standards-enabled interoperability promise returns in the form of more effective and efficient core activities, such as recruitment, grant application and fundraising. Furthermore, it has direct implications on the cost of user provisioning and deprovisioning, as well as security and auditability. Additionally, IAM is a core capability in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. It is especially important to be able to benefit from the quickly increasing internal and external sourcing options, such as Web services for administrative applications and "cloud" email.

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Cisco; e-Security; EMC; IBM; Microsoft; netForensics; NetIQ; Novell; OpenID; Oracle; Sun Microsystems; Sxip

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Recommended Reading: "Hype Cycle for Identity and Access Management Technologies, 2011"

SOA Analysis By: Daniel Sholler Definition: Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a design paradigm and discipline that can be used by IT to improve its ability to quickly and efficiently meet business demands. Some organizations have realized significant benefits using SOA, including faster time to market, lower costs, better application consistency and increased agility.

SOA delivers these benefits by reducing redundancy and increasing the usability, maintainability and value of software systems. When applied effectively, the SOA paradigm produces application systems that are intrinsically interoperable and modular. Intrinsic interoperability makes systems easier to use. Modularity makes systems easier to maintain. Improving system maintainability makes it easier and faster to make changes (i.e., it increases agility), and reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the system.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: SOA has been widely adopted as a means of creating leverage within the software portfolio, and its principles are used to develop integration relationships inside and outside the enterprise. SOA is also the primary model for integrating cloudbased applications into the existing system portfolio.

Vendors of middleware, development tools and packaged applications have delivered SOA capabilities in most of their products, although the implementations are still superficial in some cases. Most user organizations are attempting to use SOA concepts as part of their system designs. However, the usual "technology as a silver bullet" thinking has largely been discredited.

The near-term return on investment in some SOA projects has been difficult to quantify, mostly because the results are spread over the lifetime of the solution. Most organizations have been pleased with the improved flexibility and long-term results. Compared with traditional monolithic or client/server applications, SOA applications are more likely to be spread across multiple computers in far-flung locations. They're more likely to be composed of parts that are developed and managed by disparate, semiautonomous IT groups (domains), often controlled by disparate business units inside and outside the company. They're also more likely to be running on a mix of heterogeneous application servers, programming languages and operating systems; and subject to frequent change, because of volatile business requirements.

SOA is part of the solution to these problems, because it clarifies system design, isolates the modules from each other and increases the interface documentation. Some organizations have been disappointed by the low level of service sharing ("reuse") that they have achieved. In cases where value is being measured, however, this value can be derived even with a modest quantity of shared services. Some SOA projects have encountered problems in governance, testing, configuration management, version control, metadata management, service-level monitoring, security and interoperability. This is to be expected, because changes in the fundamental structure of business processes and application architectures of this magnitude do not happen quickly or easily, and the challenges are based on the heterogeneous and distributed nature of the systems,

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not on any characteristic of SOA. User migration to SOA began in the late 1990s, and continues today. Most organizations have some commitment to SOA, and we expect that this will be nearly universal by 2013.

User Advice: Use SOA to design large, new business applications, particularly those with life spans projected to be more than three years, and those that will undergo continuous refinement, maintenance or enlargement. SOA is especially well-suited to composite applications in which components are built or managed by separate teams in disparate locations. These components can also leverage pre-SOA applications by wrapping function and data with service interfaces.

When buying packaged applications, rate those that implement SOA more highly than those that don't. Also, use SOA in application integration scenarios that involve composite applications that tie new logic to purchased packages, legacy applications or services offered by other business units — such as those found in software as a service (SaaS) and other types of cloud computing. However, do not discard non-SOA applications in favor of SOA applications solely on the basis of architecture. Discard non-SOA applications only if there are compelling business reasons why they have become unsatisfactory.

Continue to use non-SOA architectures for some new, tactical applications of limited size and complexity, as well as for minor changes to installed, non-SOA applications. There are multiple patterns within SOA — including multichannel applications, composite applications, multistep process flows, REST and event-driven architecture (EDA) — and each pattern has its own best practices for design, deployment and management.

Business Impact: Like the relational data model and the graphical user interface, SOA represents a durable change in application architecture. SOA's main benefit is that it reduces the time and effort required to change application systems to support changes in the business. Business functions are represented in the design of SOA software services, which help align business and technology models. The implementation of the first SOA application in a business domain will generally be as difficult as, or more difficult than, building the same application using non-SOA designs.

Subsequent applications and changes to the initial SOA application will be easier, faster and less expensive, because they'll leverage the SOA infrastructure and previously built services.

SOA is an essential ingredient in strategies that look to enhance a company's agility. SOA also reduces the cost of application integration, especially after enough applications have been converted or modernized to support an SOA model. The transition to SOA is a long-term, gradual trend, and it will not lead to a strategic realignment in vendor ranks or an immediate reduction in user companies' IT outlays.

Benefit Rating: Transformational Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Recommended Reading: "SOA Overview and Guide to SOA Research" "Q&A: Key Questions to Address Before Your Initial SOA Projects" Page 82 of 97

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"Toolkit: Building a Business Case Justification for SOA Projects" "Key Issues for SOA, 2010" "How to Approach Integration in Advanced SOA Projects" "The 13 Most Common SOA Mistakes and How to Avoid Them" "SOA and Application Architecture Key Initiative Overview"

Windows-Based Tablet PCs Analysis By: Leslie Fiering Definition: Windows-based tablet PCs are differentiated from media tablets, such as Apple's iPad, because they run a full, user-controlled OS. These tablets are largely targeted at the business and education sectors. They meet all criteria for a notebook PC, are equipped with a pen and an onscreen digitizer, and run Windows XP Professional Tablet Edition, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

There are two form factors: slates, which don't have a keyboard; and convertibles, which have attached keyboards and swivel screens that lie flat on the keyboard when in tablet mode. Slate adoption tends to be restricted to vertical applications with walking workers and "clipboard replacement," although the growing popularity of media tablets has generated greater interest in the Windows-based slate form factor for more general-purpose use.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Despite the stability of the underlying tablet PC technology, the price premium of at least $100, if not more, over similarly configured clamshell notebooks and the lack of tablet-optimized applications have prevented broader mainstream adoption of Windows-based tablets. In some cases, hardware OEMs are adding high-end features (such as Intel Core i7 processors and solid-state drives) to drive the price premium even higher.

Windows-based tablet PCs have long been a staple for certain vertical applications like healthcare, law enforcement, field service and the military.

Ruggedized models make Windows-based tablets particularly attractive for emergency services and field applications.

Sales, which Gartner considers a "semivertical" market, originally showed interest in tablet PCs but has shifted focus to lighter-weight, less-expensive media tablets.

The ability to do nontext entries (such as diagrams and formulas) continues to make pen-centric Windows-based tablets attractive for higher education students. A growing number of third-party applications and pens are enabling these note-taking functions on media tablets. Most, while immature for enterprise production use, have the potential to meet student note-taking requirements.

The K-12 education market was an early adopter of Windows-based tablet PCs, since many younger children find direct screen manipulation an aid to learning. Media tablets may fulfill this function even better. However, students in upper grades often need pens to annotate their work or

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to use Windows-based applications. Since many schools are reluctant to standardize on multiple platforms, the default for the moment at these schools remains Windows-based tablets.

The greater ease of use of touch in media tablets (which are largely focused on content consumption, rather than on content creation), along with the greater convenience of instant-on, allday batteries and simple, easy-to-learn apps, are all limiting the growth of Windows-based tablet PCs beyond the markets where they are already established. Windows-based tablets currently represent less than 1% of the total notebook market. Expect the share to drop even lower as these products are further marginalized by the growing capabilities of media tablets.

User Advice: Consider a Windows-based tablet PC as a solid and mature option for vertical or education applications in which it solves a specific problem. Do not consider Windows-based tablet PCs for broad, mainstream deployment because of the price premium. Consider Windows-based tablet PCs when: ■

Handwriting recognition is required (especially for forms).

■

Windows-based endpoint security is required.

■

Windows legacy applications must be supported.

■

Ruggedized slates are required.

Business Impact: Windows-based tablet PCs are useful in vertical applications for clipboard replacement. University students find Windows-based tablet PCs useful where nontext entry is required. K-12 will continue to find Windows-based tablet PCs useful to combine traditional PC usage with various input modalities to extend the types of pedagogical materials used in the classroom.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Early mainstream Sample Vendors: Acer; Dell; Fujitsu; HP; Lenovo; Toshiba Recommended Reading: "Case Study: Model One-to-One Technology Support: Klein Forest High School, Texas" "Notebook PCs: Technology Overview"

Federated Identity Management Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl; Gregg Kreizman Definition: Federated identity management enables identity information to be shared among several entities and across trust domains. Tools and standards permit identity and other information to be transferred from one trusted identifying and authenticating entity to another for authentication, authorization and other purposes.

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Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The education community has been a forerunner in the implementation of identity and access management (IAM) federations, and Gartner's latest survey showed a major jump in penetration from 33% to 69% worldwide for Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)-based federations. However, the data might be somewhat skewed this year due to low participation from North America. The geographical spread is smaller this year, with Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) leading with 76%, before Asia/Pacific at 71%, and North America at 50%. In particular, the North America number is high, but not totally off track. National IAM federations usually originate in national research and education network organizations (NRENs) and are initiated to share resources nationally, such as high-performance computing, research databases and library (publisher) services. Today, the dominant design is based on SAML and derivatives of an early Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) schema called EduPerson (which has many commonly defined identity attributes, such as student, staff and organization).

EduPerson is important, as it enables "role-centric" access management that is suitable for many different types of services. A "reference" implementation is the SWITCHaai (www.switch.ch/aai), which encompasses more than 40 organizations, over 95% of the students (users) and more than 350 services in the higher education community in Switzerland.

Federated IAM has also spread to the extended education community, including K-12, as shown by the Norwegian Feide and the U.K. Access Management Federation. This is mainly driven by an insight that the whole community shares students for many years and that several administrative processes can be simplified if federated IAM is implemented.

The relatively high adoption rate in higher education has historically been driven by IT interests focused on federated IAM as an "obviously needed" infrastructure, not on the actual services that exploit it. However, increased interest in shared services induced by the financial crisis and an increasing amount of SAML-enabled cloud services give new momentum to federated IAM implementation. This merits a final jump to the end of the Hype Cycle, with the expectation that it will leave the Hype Cycle next year.

User Advice: Of the three paradigms — user-centric IAM, organization-centric IAM and federated IAM — federated is actually the most technologically mature. Having established SAML as a protocol, EduPerson as a format and with several OSS (Shibboleth and SimpleSAMLphp) and commercial federated IAM applications available, implementing a federated IAM capability is now a low risk and relatively straightforward institutional decision. Furthermore, the higher education community is very advanced in its adoption of federated IAM relative to other sectors. This is mainly due to being culturally very prepared for collaboration, as well as having access to a highly skilled network of specialists as a result of the involvement in the development of the Internet. Specifically, the NRENs are a crucial platform for developing and harboring national IAM federations. However, emphasis is still needed on bringing service providers into the federations and investigating shared services in the community.

For effective federation identity management, the greatest attention should be given to partner readiness, governance agreements and federation metadata management to ensure the fastest time to value. Federation startups can take longer when federation is new to one or both partners.

Governance agreements stipulate requirements for each side — for example, time expectations for deprovisioning a user when that user leaves the organization, and determining who is liable for

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fraudulent authentications. Metadata management has to do with agreeing to the data types that will be transmitted across trust boundaries, performing the operational steps to map data syntax and format between federation partners, and managing that operation moving forward.

Business Impact: Federated identity management is positioned to provide a foundation for student, institution or school identification; authentication; and authorization across trust boundaries. The primary benefits are reduced identity administration for service providers, reduced authentication failures for users, and user convenience through single sign-on. In the public sector specifically, it can also act as a catalyst for shared services.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience Maturity: Mature mainstream Sample Vendors: CA Technologies; EMC; Exostar; IBM; Liberty Alliance; Lighthouse Security Group; Microsoft; Novell; Oracle; Ping Identity; Symplified; TriCipher Recommended Reading: "Q&A: Frequently Asked Questions About Identity Federation, 2010" "The State of User-Centric Identity Frameworks, 2010" "IAM Gateways to the Cloud Are Maturing" "Three Paradigms of IAM in Higher Education: Description, Trends and Lessons Learned"

Open-Source E-Learning Applications Analysis By: Marti Harris Definition: Open-source e-learning applications are education e-learning systems developed via open-source or community source models.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Open-source e-learning platforms such as Moodle and Sakai have proven to offer mature, out-of-the-box solutions; consistent adoption; and the ability to implement and bring live. Maturing community source management in the case of Sakai, and an increasing commercial support ecosystem for both Sakai and Moodle (see www.moodle.com for a listing of vendors), together with turbulence in the commercial e-learning platform market, have continued to increase the open-source software (OSS) "market share." OSS e-learning platforms now represent 58% of all installed platforms, and are in 21% of institutions, where the platform is designated as the "single official campuswide standard for the delivery of all e-learning courses," according to Gartner's 2010 E-Learning Survey for Higher Education.

User Advice: Open-source solutions for e-learning are a particularly good fit for institutions capable of supporting in-house application development. However, the continued development of viable commercial ecosystems enables more institutions to adopt OSS e-learning platforms without internal development capabilities. CIOs need to be practical and not parochial when assessing OSS

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options. They need to consider all the standard factors, such as the full life cycle total cost of ownership (TCO), as well as available skills, flexibility for the future, and community and commercial support for successful deployment of e-learning projects. Look to commercial providers of service and support of Moodle or Sakai if support for in-house development is not desired or possible.

Business Impact: The benefit of OSS e-learning platforms is potentially high because it directly affects the core process of education in the institution. Flexibility in changing the functionality and speed of change are potentially crucial factors for some institutions.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience Maturity: Mature mainstream Sample Vendors: Claroline; ILIAS; Moodle; Sakai Recommended Reading: "Open Source in Higher Education, 2008" "Gartner Higher Education E-Learning Survey, 2008-2009: OSS Momentum Continues, but Is Not Alone in Changing the Market" "Gartner Higher Education E-Learning Survey 2008-2009: Poised for the Next Step?"

Off the Hype Cycle Blogs Analysis By: Mike McGuire Definition: A blog, which derives from the term "weblog," is a website designed to make it easy for users to create entries in chronological order. The entries are then displayed in reverse chronological order (most recent entry first) and are generally archived on a periodic basis. Blogs are mostly used to express opinions on topical events such as sports, music, fashion or politics, but in the past three years, they have emerged as established communication channels for businesses as well as individuals. "Microblogging" has emerged via a platform such as Twitter, which not only allows users to write 140-character posts and share them with humanity, but also serves as an impressive news- and taste-sharing vehicle too, because a blog author or journalist can use it to drive awareness of new posts, articles and so on.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: As we noted in last year's Hype Cycle, "blogs are pervasive." In fact, reporter blogs are de rigueur for most newspapers and magazines; companies such as Google seem to have tailored their entire corporate communication strategies to various Google blogs. In addition to the aforementioned Google, Yahoo and Six Apart, among others, have blogging platforms, and publishers have begun to monetize blogs. New users are coming onto the Internet every day, more than a few of whom are or will be utilizing blogs. Enterprise- and CEOauthored blogs are commonplace, with some company executives regularly posting. Companies

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such as Yahoo or Google frequently announce new-product betas on their blogs. Those who promulgate the "blogs have peaked" position also ignore the real trend toward extending the blogging phenomenon to mobile devices, with iPhones and consumer smartphones becoming important creation tools for bloggers. Twitter has emerged as a powerful syndication tool, but its users are increasingly tweeting the "first draft" of history, as news about uprisings in the Middle East and the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan hit the consciousness of many people via tweets.

Given the above, we are officially moving blogs off the Hype Cycle. They have become a permanent part of the communication ecosystem for individuals, media companies and enterprises. In business, blogs from executives or prominent employees are often the primary form of communications with customers, investors, partners and the public. One note of caution (initially raised in the 2010 Broadcasting and Entertainment Hype Cycle) about the use of blogs by enterprises: Gartner believes that, at some point, financial regulators may examine how blogs can, or cannot, be viewed as "official" communications for publicly traded companies. If company blogs for publicly traded companies do come under some form of regulation, such as how press releases on significant news must be reviewed by the SEC prior to release, Gartner does not believe it will curtail or hinder their continued use.

User Advice: As a mainstream platform for content distribution, blogs are driving the alignment of IT and business forces, resulting in things such as blogging policies for public-facing divisions of companies, not to mention the use of internal blogs to keep teams apprised of developments and more. It's generally a best practice to involve the company's public relations group in the review of an enterprise's blog and, if it is a public company, to involve investor relations. Companies should fully disclose the provenance of their blogs and eschew temptations to create false or deceptive "fan" blogs, often called "flogs," which almost invariably backfire into public relations disasters.

Business Impact: The impact on the development of blogs has been significant. Virtually all major newspapers, magazines and other media outlets have added blogs as another way to link to consumers. Public-facing media companies and enterprises have or are establishing blogging strategies and policies, including Gartner.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience Maturity: Off the Hype Cycle Sample Vendors: Blogger; Six Apart; Traction Software; WordPress

Grid Computing Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Grid computing in higher education refers to using computers owned by more than one organization to collectively accomplish large tasks, such as theoretical chemistry calculations, Large Hadron Collider data analysis or complex simulations.

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Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Grid computing in higher education is largely a research university activity; regional grids and research-related grids have become common, and they are a norm for research-intensive universities. The maturity level is now well into Mature Mainstream, and grid computing is now off the Hype Cycle.

User Advice: Grid computing provides a way to bring more computing and storage resources to the institution and researcher than could be afforded by each institution or individual research project. It offers opportunities for service, support, software and storage from universities, as well as national, regional, and corporate laboratories and computing centers, to be shared in a common grid. In addition, grid computing can help universities meet changing demands, as well as provide a means for archiving and recovery. A crucial skill to get full advantage of grid computing is parallel programming skills.

Business Impact: Grid computing provides increased computing power and greater opportunities for collaboration across different geographies and needs. It also provides a cost-effective way for universities to manage changing computing and research requirements. A potentially disrupting trend is the emergence of cloud computing, where computing power can be bought "on demand."

Benefit Rating: High Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience Maturity: Off the Hype Cycle Sample Vendors: Appistry; Digipede; HP; IBM; Platform Computing; Sun Microsystems; Univa UD

Microblogging Analysis By: Jeffrey Mann Definition: "Microblogging" is the term given to a narrow-scope mode of social communication pioneered by the social network site Twitter.com and followed by similar services from Plurk, Yammer, Socialcast and Identi.ca. The concept is surprisingly simple: users publish a one-line status message to their contacts, who have chosen to follow their activities on the service. Users can see the collected statuses of all the people they choose to follow. Even those who do not want to follow many people can search through the microblogging stream for topics or tags that they are interested in. Trending topics provide a condensed view of what everyone on the service is talking about. The content of status messages (called "tweets" on Twitter) ranges from the mundanely trivial ("I am eating eggs") to a random insight ("I think blogging is our online biography in prose, and Twitter is the punctuation") to a reaction to an event ("A passenger plane just landed on the Hudson River!").

Twitter's dominance has led to the practice being called "twittering" or "tweeting," but it is also referred to as microblogging: to broaden the focus from a single vendor and to point out how this style of communication has augmented, and partially replaced, blogging. Even though microblogging superficially resembles instant messaging (IM), tweets are published to a group of interested people — making it more similar to blogging than the person-to-person nature of IM.

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The trendsetting Twitter system intentionally constrains messages to 140 characters, which is the limit of an SMS text message on a mobile phone. This simple constraint enhances the user experience of those who consume this information. Tweets are small tidbits of information, easily digested and just as easily ignored — as the moment dictates. Other intentional constraints are designed to provide a high-impact user experience through minimalist design: no categories, no attachments, no scheduled postings. These constraints are a matter of some debate among users, leading Twitter to add more functionality during the past year: groups or lists, trending topics and retweets. Competitors offer more fully-featured alternatives (for example, Plurk and FriendFeed) or open-source approaches (such as Identi.ca, based on StatusNet), but have not been able to challenge the dominance of Twitter in the consumer market. One key factor behind Twitter's success over its competitors, has been its early offering of an API to third-party developers. This has led to dozens of packages that enable users to access the Twitter service and post content, either through a mobile device or a more fully-featured desktop client. Examples include Seesmic, TweetDeck, Twitterrific and TwitterBerry. These third-party packages can provide offline capability, as well as features that fill in the gaps in Twitter's online offering. Twitter recently offered its own BlackBerry client as well.

Twitter's open nature makes it largely unsuitable for internal use within enterprises, or for confidential communications with partners — leaving an opportunity for new offerings. Services such as salesforce.com's Chatter, Yammer, Socialcast and Present.ly provide microblogging services aimed at individual companies, which provide more control and security than public services such as Twitter. Microblogging is also rapidly becoming a standard feature in enterprise social software platforms such as Socialtext, NewsGator, BroadVision Clearvale, IBM Connections and Jive.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Microblogging has moved off the Hype Cycle, because it has combined with activity streams — which are essentially microblogs plus alerts automatically generated from events in other systems. This development was predicted in the research note "Twitter for Business: Activity Streams Are the Future of Enterprise Microblogging," and has largely come to pass.

User Advice: Adopt social media sooner rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in a failure to engage and being left mute in a debate in which your voice should be heard.

Before using social media to communicate, listen to the channel, learn the language and become familiar with the social norms; only then should you begin speaking. As with any other language, good results are achieved with regular, consistent practice, rather than with "spotty" participation.

Remind employees that the policies already in place (public blogging policies, protection of intellectual property and confidentiality, for example) apply to microblogging as well. It is not always necessary to issue new guidelines.

Because Twitter is a public forum, employees should understand the limits of what is acceptable and desirable.

Business Impact: Despite its popularity, microblogging will have moderate impact overall on how people in organizations communicate and collaborate. It has earned its place alongside other

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channels (such as email, blogging and wikis) in enabling new kinds of fast, witty and easy-toassimilate exchanges, but remains only one of many channels available. Microblogging has greater potential to provide enterprise value than these alternative channels — by coordinating large numbers of people and providing close to real time insights into group activities. These masscoordination and mass-awareness possibilities are being explored by some early adopters, but have yet to achieve broad adoption.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience Maturity: Off the Hype Cycle Sample Vendors: Blogtronix; BroadVision Inc.; Identi.ca; Jaiku; salesforce.com; Seesmic; Socialcast; Socialtext; Tweet Scan; Twitter; Yammer Recommended Reading: "SWOT: Twitter, Worldwide" "Four Ways in Which Enterprises Are Using Twitter" "Twitter for Business: Activity Streams Are the Future of Enterprise Microblogging" "Case Study: Social Filtering of Real-Time Business Events at Stratus With Salesforce.com's Chatter" "Should Retailers Use Twitter?"

Podcasting Learning Content Analysis By: Jan-Martin Lowendahl Definition: Podcasting learning content involves the prerecorded, radiolike format delivery of content via Really Simple Syndication across a varied set of content themes.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Podcasts for learning purposes barely exist as a stand-alone tool anymore. They have been incorporated in other technologies such as social software tools, learning management platforms, and other broadcasting tools that also include video, such as iTunes and YouTube University. But the main superseding technology for higher education institutions is lecture capture and retrieving tools. Podcasts for learning content have been marked "Obsolete Before Plateau" for a few years, and now we finally take it off the Hype Cycle.

User Advice: While podcasting is a relatively easy way to deliver lectures for distance learning, as well as for follow-up study access, other tools that include video, audio and whiteboard technologies are quietly incorporating or replacing podcasts (audio only) on most campuses. Social networks are also being used for posting of audio and video and are a growing preference for students. Now, podcasting is all but replaced by part of a larger learning ecosystem to bring digital content to the users. See the entry for lecture capture and retrieval tools.

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Business Impact: Podcasting is an extremely efficient method for delivering audio and spokenword content to students, and it can be an important institutional communications tool.

Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience Maturity: Off the Hype Cycle Sample Vendors: Apple; NotePage; Softease

Appendixes

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Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Education, 2010

expectations

Social-Data Portability Media Tablet Cloud HPC/CaaS Social Learning Platform Mobile-Learning Low-Range/ Midrange Handsets

Web-Based Office Productivity Suites Lecture Capture and Retrieval Tools Mobile-Learning Smartphone Open-Source Financials EA Frameworks Grid Computing

User-Centric IAM Open-Source Middleware Suites CobiT

Pen-Centric Tablet PCs

E-Textbook

Cloud E-Mail

Digital Preservation of Research Data

Unified Communications and Collaboration

Open-Source E-Learning Applications

Blogs Web and Application Hosting Virtual Environments/ Federated Identity Management Virtual Worlds Podcasting Learning Content Hosted Virtual CRM for Enrollment Management Desktops Global Library Open-Source SIS Organization-Centric IAM Digitization Projects SOA E-Learning BPO Wikis Repositories Open-Source Portals SIS International Data Mashups E-Portfolios Interoperability Standards Hosted PC Virtualization Social Media Affective Computing Software Game Consoles as Media Hubs Quantum Computing Emergency/Mass Notification Software IT Infrastructure Utility Intellectual Property Rights and SaaS Administration Applications Royalties Management Software 802.11n As of July 2010 ITIL

Technology Trigger

Microblogging

Peak of Inflated Expectations

Trough of Disillusionment

Slope of Enlightenment

Plateau of Productivity

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5 to 10 years

more than 10 years

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Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases Phase

Definition

Technology Trigger

A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant press and industry interest.

Peak of Inflated Expectations

During this phase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of wellpublicized activity by technology leaders results in some successes, but more failures, as the technology is pushed to its limits. The only enterprises making money are conference organizers and magazine publishers.

Trough of Disillusionment

Because the technology does not live up to its overinflated expectations, it rapidly becomes unfashionable. Media interest wanes, except for a few cautionary tales.

Slope of Enlightenment

Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of organizations lead to a true understanding of the technology's applicability, risks and benefits. Commercial off-the-shelf methodologies and tools ease the development process.

Plateau of Productivity

The real-world benefits of the technology are demonstrated and accepted. Tools and methodologies are increasingly stable as they enter their second and third generations. Growing numbers of organizations feel comfortable with the reduced level of risk; the rapid growth phase of adoption begins. Approximately 20% of the technology's target audience has adopted or is adopting the technology as it enters this phase.

Years to Mainstream Adoption

The time required for the technology to reach the Plateau of Productivity.

Source: Gartner (July 2011)

Table 2. Benefit Ratings Benefit Rating

Definition

Transformational

Enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics

High

Enables new ways of performing horizontal or vertical processes that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise

Moderate

Provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise

Low

Slightly improves processes (for example, improved user experience) that will be difficult to translate into increased revenue or cost savings

Source: Gartner (July 2011)

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Table 3. Maturity Levels Maturity Level

Status

Products/Vendors

Embryonic

■

In labs

■

None

Emerging

■

Commercialization by vendors Pilots and deployments by industry leaders

■

First generation High price Much customization

Adolescent

■

Maturing technology capabilities and process understanding Uptake beyond early adopters

■

Second generation Less customization

Early mainstream

■

Proven technology Vendors, technology and adoption rapidly evolving

■

Third generation More out of box Methodologies

Mature mainstream

■

Robust technology Not much evolution in vendors or technology

■

Several dominant vendors

Legacy

■

Not appropriate for new developments Cost of migration constrains replacement

■

Maintenance revenue focus

Obsolete

■

Rarely used

■

Used/resale market only

Source: Gartner (July 2011)

Recommended Reading Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Understanding Gartner's Hype Cycles, 2011" "Case Study: Approaching the Learning Stack: The Third-Generation LMS at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya" "The 2011 Higher Education CIO's Agenda: Lean Controlled Growth" "Predicts 2011: Technology and the Transformation of the Education Ecosystem" "Cool Vendors in Education, 2011" "Key Issues for Higher Education, 2011" "Key Issues for K-12 Education, 2011" "Overview of Kuali Administrative OSS Offerings for Higher Education"

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"OSS Administrative Solutions in Higher Education Are Becoming More Viable" "Q&A: .edu CIO Top Questions About No-Fee E-Mail Services" "Public-Sector IT Sourcing in EMEA: What Government and Higher Education Can Learn From Each Other" "E-Mail as a Service as an Icebreaker: The E-Mail Sourcing Trend in Higher Education, 2006 to 2010" "The Strategic Technology Map and Education Hype Cycle Mashup for K-12 Education" "Case Study: University of Canberra Achieves a Step Change With Offshore Outsourcing" "Executive Perspectives: Strategic Business Capabilities and the Gartner Hype Cycle" This research is part of a set of related research pieces. See Gartner's Hype Cycle Special Report for 2011 for an overview.

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