Hype Cycle For Web Computing 290522

G00290522
Hype Cycle for Web Computing, 2016

Published: 2 August 2016
Analyst(s): Magnus Revang
Web technologies create the fabric that enables digital businesses to run.
Understanding when and how to use emerging and evolving web
technology is critical for IT organizations as they become the engine room
for the transitioned digital business.
Table of Contents
Analysis.................................................................................................................................................. 3
What You Need to Know.................................................................................................................. 3
The Hype Cycle................................................................................................................................ 3
The Priority Matrix.............................................................................................................................6
Off the Hype Cycle........................................................................................................................... 7
On the Rise...................................................................................................................................... 8
Bots........................................................................................................................................... 8
Event-Driven Programming Models.............................................................................................9
Progressive Web Apps............................................................................................................. 10
Ambient Experiences................................................................................................................ 11
Continuous Experience.............................................................................................................13
Design Thinking........................................................................................................................ 14
Web Notifications......................................................................................................................16
Conversational User Interfaces................................................................................................. 17
Web Components.................................................................................................................... 18
Full-Stack JavaScript................................................................................................................ 20
At the Peak.....................................................................................................................................21
Web-Scale Application Architecture.......................................................................................... 21
Cloud Citizen Integrator Services (iSaaS).................................................................................. 23
DXPs (formerly UXPs)............................................................................................................... 25
Microservices........................................................................................................................... 27
Server-Side JavaScript............................................................................................................. 29
High-Performance JavaScript................................................................................................... 30
Tag Management......................................................................................................................31
Web Real-Time Communications..............................................................................................33
HTTP/2.....................................................................................................................................35
WebGL..................................................................................................................................... 37
Sliding Into the Trough.................................................................................................................... 38
Event-Driven Web.....................................................................................................................38
UX Tools................................................................................................................................... 39
Public Web APIs....................................................................................................................... 41
Context-Enriched Services....................................................................................................... 42
Methodological UX Design........................................................................................................44
Client-Side MVC....................................................................................................................... 45
A/B and Multivariate Testing......................................................................................................47
Lean Portals............................................................................................................................. 48
Responsive Design................................................................................................................... 50
Semantic Web.......................................................................................................................... 52
Portal PaaS.............................................................................................................................. 53
Cloud Computing..................................................................................................................... 55
Climbing the Slope......................................................................................................................... 57
Mobile Web Apps..................................................................................................................... 57
Website Experience Analytics................................................................................................... 58
Cloud/Web Platforms............................................................................................................... 60
HTML5..................................................................................................................................... 61
Hybrid Mobile Development......................................................................................................63
Content Migration..................................................................................................................... 64
Entering the Plateau....................................................................................................................... 66
Portal-Less Portals................................................................................................................... 66
Web-Oriented Architecture....................................................................................................... 68
Appendixes.................................................................................................................................... 69
Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels.......................................................... 71
Gartner Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................... 72
List of Tables
Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases................................................................................................................. 71

Table 2. Benefit Ratings........................................................................................................................ 71
Page 2 of 74 Gartner, Inc. | G00290522

Table 3. Maturity Levels........................................................................................................................ 72
List of Figures
Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Web Computing, 2016.....................................................................................5

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Web Computing, 2016................................................................................. 7
Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Web Computing, 2015...................................................................................70
Analysis
What You Need to Know
Web technologies are the enabler of the current wave of digitalization. The trajectory is still fast-
moving, from content delivery and marketing support to enabling transactional, business-critical
applications. It makes up the fabric that connects people, content, applications, data, devices and
enterprises. It expands computing into contexts in which computing was not previously available,
creating opportunity for new products and services. Innovation is happening in the core
technologies — following these innovations will be new opportunities.
Whether traditional and conservative, fast-moving and experimental, or belonging to the great gray
zone between the two extremes, enterprises need to embrace these technologies to gain
competitive advantage.
The Hype Cycle

The web technologies form the fabric that enables digital business. It expends computing to
connect ever more people, content, applications, data, devices and enterprises with each other. As
the connections continuously increase, opportunities arise for new products, services and business
models. The pace of innovation is staggering in the world, and it's almost exclusively fueled by web
technologies.
While many enterprises have struggled to move their business from the physical domain to the
internet, and later to the mobile web, the smart enterprises are not thinking "how can we move
existing services to a digital platform?", they're not even thinking "how can we change our existing
services to thrive digitally?". Rather, they are asking "what new products, services and business
models can we embrace that new web technologies enable?". To thrive in the digital age,
enterprises have to embrace innovation, which is why we see the entry of design thinking, the
further advancement of design methodologies and a focus on technologies that enable the creation
of digital experiences. It's the realization that, in order to survive, enterprises have to reinvent
themselves as digital enterprises.
Gartner, Inc. | G00290522 Page 3 of 74

Technology is expanding the possibility space by enabling enterprises to connect to more people in
different situations. The entry of both conversational user interfaces and bots in the Hype Cycle
shows that technology provides new ways for people to interact with machines, but also shows that
technology is enabling software to act differently. This signals the point where web technologies
have passed the phase of enabling the movement of products, services and business models from
physical to digital, and entered a phase where these things are born digital first.
The web continues to be the primary way in which we connect with the digital world. The majority of
the foundational technologies are stable, and in many instances we are seeing evolution rather than
revolution. Incremental capability expansion happens in all web technologies continuously. The fast
pace at which this space has developed means that we have created a tremendous gap between
what is possible to build versus what is actually being built. There used to be an abundance of
ideas, but the technology needed to bring them to market still needed to be invented — today, we
have an abundance of technology, but not enough ideas to use it to the full.

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Web Computing, 2016
expectations
Microservices
DXPs (formerly UXPs) Server-Side JavaScript
Cloud Citizen Integrator Services (iSaaS) High-Performance JavaScript
Web-Scale Application Architecture Tag Management
Web Real-Time Communications
HTTP/2
WebGL
Full-Stack JavaScript Event-Driven Web
UX Tools
Web Components
Public Web APIs
Conversational User Interfaces Context-Enriched Services
Methodological UX Design Web-Oriented Architecture
Web Notifications
Design Thinking Portal-Less Portals
Continuous Experience Client-Side MVC
Ambient Experiences Content Migration
A/B and Multivariate Testing
Hybrid Mobile Development
Lean Portals HTML5
Responsive Design Cloud/Web Platforms
Website Experience Analytics
Semantic Web Mobile Web Apps
Cloud Computing
Progressive Web Apps Portal PaaS
Event-Driven Programming Models
Bots As of August 2016
Peak of
Innovation Trough of Plateau of
Inflated Slope of Enlightenment
Trigger Disillusionment Productivity
Expectations
time
Years to mainstream adoption: obsolete
less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years before plateau
Source: Gartner (August 2016)

The Priority Matrix
Many technologies on the web computing Hype Cycle have seen broad adoption — among them,
web-oriented architecture, cloud/web platforms and HTML5. These are stable, mature technologies
that pose little risk if adopted.
Other technologies on this Hype Cycle are not so mature and warrant careful adoption. These
include web notifications and web components. Type A enterprises can use these technologies with
some caution, but Type B enterprises should examine them closely and use them opportunistically,
and Type C enterprises should sit back and track them for a while.
IT leaders should expect technologies that are more than 10 years to mainstream adoption to
mature slowly. Patience is required.
On the other end of the spectrum, technologies less than five years to mainstream adoption are
maturing quickly — special care should be given to them as they could provide rapid benefit. Some
items are still young, such as high-performance JavaScript, webGL and microservices, but will
mature rapidly — look for a fast transition across the Hype Cycle curve and be aware that
enterprises have traditionally been too slow to adopt these kinds of web technologies in the past,
and are now struggling because they were late entrants into deploying technologies that are fast
approaching the Plateau of Productivity.

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Web Computing, 2016
benefit years to mainstream adoption

less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years
transformational Cloud Computing Conversational User

Interfaces
Context-Enriched
Services
Public Web APIs
Web Real-Time
Communications
high Hybrid Mobile A/B and Multivariate Bots

Development Testing
Continuous Experience
Mobile Web Apps Cloud/Web Platforms
Design Thinking
Web-Oriented HTML5
Architecture DXPs (formerly UXPs)
Methodological UX Design
Event-Driven
Microservices Programming Models
Responsive Design Full-Stack JavaScript
WebGL Server-Side JavaScript
Web Components
Web-Scale Application
Architecture
moderate Portal-Less Portals Client-Side MVC Ambient Experiences

Content Migration Cloud Citizen Integrator
Services (iSaaS)
High-Performance
JavaScript Event-Driven Web
Lean Portals HTTP/2
Portal PaaS UX Tools
Progressive Web Apps
Semantic Web
Tag Management
Website Experience
Analytics
low Web Notifications
As of August 2016
Off the Hype Cycle

The following technology profiles were on the 2015 Hype Cycle for web computing, but have not
transitioned to the 2016 version.
No longer hyped:
■ Cloud UXP Services (incorporated into DXP)

■ Semantic Annotators
Focus shifted to other Hype Cycles:
■ Cloud Office
■ Social Analytics
■ Native Mobile Development
Name changes:
■ User Experience Platforms (UXPs) changed to Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)
On the Rise
Bots
Analysis By: Van L. Baker; Magnus Revang
Definition: Bots are microservices or apps that can operate on other bots, apps or services in
response to event triggers or user requests. They may invoke other services or applications, often
emulating a user or app, or using an API to achieve the same effect. These requests can be initiated
via conversational UIs or in response to a change in the state of a back-end application or
database. Bots automate tasks based on predefined rules or via more sophisticated algorithms,
which may involve machine learning.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: While bots have existed for close to a decade, they
have largely been isolated instances that were either experimental or very narrowly focused. Only
recently have bots emerged as a technology with the potential to transform workflows. The
combination of event-driven programming models and bots has the potential to shift applications
from request-driven activities to automated activities that push information and choices to users on
an as-needed basis.
When combined with conversational UIs, bots also give users the ability to interact with applications
in a manner similar to human-to-human communication. A bot that is used in this manner is often
referred to as a "chatbot." If you combine bots with conversational UIs and machine learning, you
have a virtual personal assistant or a virtual customer assistant. Bots can be combined to create
larger bots that can accomplish either more complex tasks or a series of tasks. Bots normally reside
in servers that are hosted in the cloud, but they can also be deployed on-premises in select
situations.
Think of bots as microapps that behave as humans do, launching other programs and generally
operating in parallel with the individuals that are utilizing them.
User Advice: Enterprises need to become familiar with the bot development frameworks, which
provide the capabilities outlined below:

■ Bots have the ability to transform the way that applications are built.
■ A shift to event-driven programming models, facilitated by the use of bots, has the potential to
change the way that users interact with technology.
■ Bots have the potential to initiate applications and deliver the results to the workforce, as
needed, without requiring user initiation of business processes.
However, enterprises should be careful not to tie bots to a given enterprise messaging platform.
Additionally, companies should not implement natural-language processing on its own; they should
instead use a framework. Lastly, if you are using chatbots, then give them a personality to avoid
appearing boring.
Business Impact: Given the potential of bots, enterprises should look for business processes that
can be handled or monitored by bots to relieve the workforce of the responsibility to initiate
applications. Routine tasks can be completely automated by bots, freeing up the workforce for
more nonstandard work. In addition, bots have the potential to ensure that employees receive the
information they needed on a more timely basis. The appropriate use of bots is also likely to
increase employee engagement, as employees will be able to focus on the more nonroutine tasks.
This, in turn, should improve the productivity of the enterprise overall.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Embryonic
Sample Vendors: Kore; Microsoft
Event-Driven Programming Models

Analysis By: Van L. Baker; Magnus Revang
Definition: Event-driven programming models are application models that allow microservices or
bots to monitor changes in the state of data or conditions, and initiate an application to perform an
activity with no user input. These applications can initiate additional actions or cause another
application to run.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: For many years now, applications have been created
based on request-driven models. With normal user interfaces, the user puts in the parameters of
what is typically an SQL query and requests the information from the database associated with the
application.
Event-driven programming models change all that. With event-driven programming models, bots
and microservices can be deployed to watch for a change in state that will trigger an application.
This is an evolution of rules- or logic-driven constructs.

Changes in state could be an increase or decrease outside a certain range in a numeric field, or a
change in a customer's state from a lead to a prospect. Once such a change takes place, the bot
will launch an application and run the task associated with the bot. This could be a push
notification, a report or another bot or service. This will allow actions to request user input on
demand rather than having the user initiate the application.
User Advice: Event-driven programming models will be disruptive and shift the responsibility to
initiate programs away from users. Users will now be notified of actions and prompted for a
response. This will facilitate more-efficient working patterns and allow for a greater degree of
nonroutine tasks for the workforce.
Enterprises should:
■ Rethink how they develop applications to leverage event-triggered services

■ Explore event-driven programming applications, tools and languages
■ Adjust business processes to facilitate event-triggered applications, reducing reliance on the
workforce to initiate applications
■ Develop applications that present simple alternatives to the workforce to minimize disruption of
nonroutine tasks
Business Impact: Incorporating event-driven programming models into your application

development strategy has the potential to dramatically alter the balance between routine and
nonroutine tasks for your workforce. This in turn has the potential to make business processes
much more efficient and allow members of your workforce to respond to events in a timely, on-
demand fashion, increasing overall productivity. The enterprise will benefit from improved business
processes and workflows. This in turn should result in greater efficiency overall as well as better
employee satisfaction and engagement.
Other measures for ROI on bots could be cost reductions and increased customer satisfaction as
employees are able to manage customer relationships in a more timely and accurate manner.
Maturity: Embryonic
Sample Vendors: Amazon
Progressive Web Apps

Analysis By: Van L. Baker
Definition: Progressive web apps strive to deliver a mobile-app-like experience without the need to
install an actual mobile app on a device. They combine an app shell built with HTML5, JavaScript

and CSS with web content delivered over the network. Progressive web apps are also able to
deliver push notifications to the users of mobile devices.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Progressive web apps improve the user experience
over time. The app shell facilitates quick loading of web content and provides users of the web
pages with the ability to place an icon on their home screen, giving the appearance of having
installed a mobile app on their device. Progressive web apps can offer a top-level, full-screen
experience without presenting the address bar, navigation controls and icons associated with the
browser. With consumers continuing to migrate to mobile devices and mobile apps, the introduction
of progressive web apps will likely further blur the lines between mobile web and mobile apps.
User Advice: Very simply, enterprises should go build some progressive web apps and determine
the suitability for their needs. This is applicable for both business-to-consumer apps and business-
to-employee apps. While progressive web apps do have very limited offline functionality they can
substantially improve the user experience of web content, giving users an experience closer to what
they have with mobile apps. The benefit of being able to deliver push notifications offers a channel
to better engage the users of the progressive web apps. For many users, the ability to place an icon
on their home page is enough to give them the usability that they perceive with mobile apps.
Business Impact: Progressive web apps can offer capabilities that can be achieved at a fraction of
the cost associated with mobile app development, and they can be delivered quickly. From the user
perspective, progressive web apps are invisible at first visit to a site via the device-resident browser,
but the functionality increases as users return to the site on subsequent visits, with the shell being
loaded on their device and, eventually with an opt-in, an icon is placed on the home page.
Progressive web apps do present some risks for the enterprise; however, as mentioned, progressive
web apps do not have offline functionality other than a few limited screens, which may only offer a
message to the users that they are offline and cannot access the capabilities of the progressive web
app.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Maturity: Embryonic
Sample Vendors: Google
Ambient Experiences
Analysis By: Brian Blau
Definition:
Ambient experiences are user experiences that emphasize proximity in space. They seamlessly
blend physical, virtual and digital environments, and adapt real-time contextual data as the ambient
environment changes or as the user moves between places. Context is injected into the system by

user actions, sensors and historical data. Output appears as information and audio displays, haptics
and graphical cues. Ambient experiences can be simple, such as contextual mood lighting, or
sophisticated, such as integrated smart app scenarios.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Ambient experiences are driven by applications that
enable users to interact with them whenever, wherever and however they want. These experiences,
while new, are advancing quickly and may progress in penetration and usefulness in less than 10
years. Users will benefit more when their contextual information is injected into the system, their
actions, the environment or historical information. As such, technology influences from virtual and
augmented reality, wearables, and virtual personal assistants indicate that there have been
advances, but they haven't reached maximum hype yet due to overall immature capabilities.
User Advice: Businesses use ambient experiences to better provide user experiences that
seemingly blend into the background, while still playing an important role in how that technology is
used. Ambient experiences will enable application, product and solution designers to enhance their
offerings based on better information about the processes, environments, communities and
identities assumed by end users. Applications and services enriched with context information are an
emerging trend that has already entered the mainstream. These technologies should be monitored
and then integrated when they have reached sufficient maturity. Advances in networks, mobile
hardware capabilities, Internet of Things, social computing, service-oriented architecture and unified
communication have moved forward enough to enable integrators to create ambient experience
solutions.
Ambient experiences were derived from a combination of Gartner's early work on context-aware
computing, combined with the sensor-laden ideas from Philips Research's work on ambient
intelligence from the late 1990s. Ambient experiences move beyond both and encompass the new
reality that digital systems are not always seamless, but are discrete. Plan ambient experiences with
context as its core, but enable application and data flow to enhance siloed systems.
Business Impact: Businesses will want to investigate how to use ambient experiences and
seamless technology spaces. Ensemble interactions, such as having a personalized virtual assistant
respond to a user's every need, are years away, but technologies such as Microsoft Cortana,
Google Now and Apple's Siri are glimpses of how these systems will work. Business spaces will be
integrated with sensors to monitor work tasks, and wearable devices such as head-mounted
displays and virtual and augmented world technologies. These new systems will help users be more
efficient and less prone to errors, as well as experience more enjoyment from their digital systems.
They will also help employees be more competitive.
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Philips Research
Recommended Reading: "Market Trends: Head-Mounted Displays for Virtual Reality and
Augmented Reality"

"How User Experience Can Make or Break Your Customer Experience"
Analysis By: Anne Thomas; Brian Blau; Ray Valdes
Definition: A continuous experience preserves continuity of user experience across traditional

boundaries of devices, time and space. Users can interact with an application in a multistep
sequence that may last through an extended period of time. The experience seamlessly flows
across multiple devices and interaction channels, including nondigital and analog channels, that
fulfill the customer journey. Channels include mobile devices, sensors, web, IVR, SMS, email, print,
VPA, call center and in-store channels.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Continuous experience is an emerging approach to

user experience (UX) design. UX design has matured for specific devices and well-established
digital channels, such as smartphone, tablet and web. The frontier is in orchestrating interactions
across channels to provide a seamless experience. Gartner previously referred to this approach as
"ensemble interactions" but is retiring the term in favor of "continuous experience."
In the full scope of the continuous experience vision, users can interact with an application via
multiple devices (such as desktop, tablet, smartphone and watch) and via multiple interaction
models (such as apps, portals, email, notifications, activity streams and SMS), including analog
media (print catalog, direct mail, fax) and in-person channels. The application automatically adapts
the experience based on users' situational context — their location, actions, environment and
previous interactions — both within the channel and across different channels. The application
exploits sensors, displays and other technology that naturally blend the physical and virtual to
provide an optimal experience. In this sense, continuous experience overlaps with another term
used by Gartner: "ambient experience." The former emphasizes continuity across time (but also
includes space), while the latter emphasizes proximity in physical space (but also includes time).
Continuous experience practices are emerging within digital business companies where an
awesome user experience is a competitive necessity. A growing number of traditional business
companies support some aspects, but very few have the technology foundation in place to fully
leverage opportunities. Instead, experiences are fragmented not only across channels, but also
within a specific channel (such as web channel or voice channel). Design practices will remain an
innovator practice for at least the next two years, and mainstream adoption won't likely occur for at
least a decade. Key to implementing a quality experience is the use of back-end application
services and unified data models to capture and preserve state so that users can seamlessly shift
from one interaction model to the next. Back-end systems are presently siloed in many
organizations, so this presents a major hurdle for organizations trying to implement continuous
experience, and it will only be resolved as platforms, integration tools and back-end architectures
mature.
User Advice: Continuous experience combines themes from Gartner's work on human/computer
interaction, customer experience, digital workplace, fit-for-purpose apps, ensemble interactions,
apps and services architecture, smart spaces, Internet of Things (IoT), context-aware computing,

social computing, and predictive analytics. Continuous experience moves beyond these
foundational concepts and encompasses the new reality that digital systems must adapt to the way
people work, transact and connect with each other. Interactions need to flow across devices and
across time. Organizations should conduct an inventory of user interactions sorted by channels,
with transitions clearly defined — a detailed version of a customer journey map.
Businesses should investigate opportunities where continuous experience orchestrated across

multiple channels over extended periods of time can provide a competitive advantage. Designing
continuous experiences requires investment in traditional UX practices (such as personas, scenarios
and prototyping), apps and services architecture (to enable a seamless flow across interaction
modes), context ingestion architecture (to enable systems to incorporate context in real time), IoT
platforms (to manage sensors, gather context and integrate with back-end systems), context broker
platforms (to provide historical context data), and complex-event processing (to perform real-time
analytics). Do not expect to solve the entire set of cross-channel UX challenges in one go. Instead,
pursue an evolutionary, step-by-step approach guided by a long-term vision of continuous
experience but shaped tactically by analytics and objective data about user behavior.
Business Impact: Businesses can leverage continuous experience design to increase customer
satisfaction and reduce customer attrition. Digital business competition has raised the bar for user
experience: Users expect a great experience, and the competition is only a click away. Businesses
can also leverage continuous experience design to improve employee productivity and to enable
people to get their work done more efficiently and effectively — wherever and however they need
to.
Maturity: Embryonic
Design Thinking
Analysis By: Gene Phifer
Definition: Design thinking is a creative process of building up ideas, where one starts with a goal
rather than attempting to solve a specific problem. There are no judgments or fear of failure,
intuition is applied to recognize patterns in the environment, and through iterative approaches
alternate solutions are explored simultaneously. Design thinking was first popularized by the Ideo
company, but now is offered by a wide variety of service providers. Several practical frameworks
like service design and lean UX are heavily inspired by design thinking.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Design thinking isn't new. Certain aspects can be
traced back to the industrial revolution (see "Design Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Customer
Experience Strategies"). Design thinking has been used in many product companies since the
mid-1990s. But it wasn't applied broadly to IT until 2012, when software vendors started to adopt
its concepts and methodologies, train their developers, and modify their software development
processes to reflect a design-thinking approach.

Adoption of design thinking by enterprise IT has been relatively slow. However, with customer
experience now a CEO-level priority, and user experience being a key contributor to CX, design
thinking is starting to gain more traction within IT. Independent software vendors (ISVs) and service
providers report that enterprises are engaging them in ever-growing numbers, and we expect design
thinking to be a relatively common methodology within the next few years.
User Advice: IT leaders should first understand what design thinking is, and is not. Design thinking
is gaining in popularity, and many traditional design methodologies are now being labelled under it.
IT leaders should consider the following:
■ Implement design thinking in your IT organization, but be careful not to fall into the trap of
"making it a process."
■ Train existing personnel on design thinking, including business leaders and executives, and
seed projects with new hires from design schools.
■ Make sure that design is a first-level priority, starting at the beginning of the project and
continuing throughout its life cycle.
■ Work with business leaders on digital business initiatives, bringing your design-thinking training
and approaches into product development activities.
■ Seek opportunities to apply design thinking to some of its historical strength areas like product
design and "wicked problem" scenarios.
■ Look at and learn from the adoption of design thinking by almost all of the major software and
IT service providers, which may have had a significant positive impact on the customer
experience of the technology solutions they deploy. Many of these ISVs and service providers
offer design-thinking training and services, some for no charge.
Business Impact: The user experience of most software developed by enterprise IT is frequently
abysmal. The negative impact that poor UX has on CX has garnered the attention of the CEO, and
IT is under significant pressure to make improvements. Design thinking can accelerate this
improvement in user experience in a big way. The application of good user-experience
methodologies does not ensure that the end product will meet the needs of the user. The empathy
that is part of design thinking helps chart the course toward the correct goal, one that satisfies the
user.
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Accenture; frog design; IBM; Ideo; Oracle; Salesforce; SAP
Recommended Reading: "Design Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Customer Experience

Strategies"

"Enterprise Architects Combine Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile to Drive Digital Innovation"
Web Notifications
Analysis By: Magnus Revang
Definition: Web notifications are push messages initiated by JavaScript on a web page or a website
inside a web browser. They are used primarily to inform visitors to a website about updates and
relevant events. They are a client-side browser technology, in contrast to native push notifications
that are initiated through a server-side service.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Web notifications are supported by all major web
browsers except Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge and Safari on iOS.
The technology enables JavaScript code, running in a browser, to initiate push notifications that the
browser will show to the user. But before sending notifications, a web page has to ask for
permission, which the user might not grant.
Over the past year, several high-profile websites have incorporated web notifications.
Even if all major browsers introduce support for web notifications, these notifications will be an
inessential addition, not a defining feature.
The promise of web notifications is that web pages will behave more like applications and become
more suitable for application usage.
Adoption of this technology by websites will largely depend on browser usage, including usage of
older browsers. In particular, the rate of transition away from older versions of Internet Explorer will
influence adoption by websites.
User Advice: Web notifications enable a website to inform users about changes without them
actually visiting the site. This improves the user experience for the most loyal users.
Look for ways to include web notifications as an enhancement to an existing Web experience,
rather than as a feature that users should depend on.
Use web notifications to inform users about updates and events that might be relevant to them —
for example, new messages, updated information, news stories or changes in the status of relevant
business processes (such as the tracking of packages or the progress of support tickets).
Avoid using web notifications for general marketing messages and information of little relevance, as
users need only one excuse to revoke permission.
Business Impact: If they receive mobile browser support, web notifications could enable more
applications to remain web-only and not require a companion native mobile app to improve the user
experience. This could simplify development of enterprise applications as developers could
standardize on the web as their platform of choice. At first, this would apply mostly to employee-
facing scenarios.

Until all browsers fully implement web notification, this technology will remain an additional feature
and not an essential part of web applications. This limits the benefits it can deliver. However, we
expect to increase the benefit rating if support from Internet Explorer and Safari on iOS is
announced.
Benefit Rating: Low
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Apple; Google; Mozilla
Conversational User Interfaces

Analysis By: Tom Austin; Van L. Baker; Magnus Revang
Definition: Conversational UI (CUI) is a high-level design model in which user and machine
interactions primarily occur in the user's spoken or written natural language. Typically informal and
bidirectional, these interactions range from simple utterances (as in "Stop," "OK" or "What time is
it?" "12:24") through highly complex interactions (collecting oral testimony from crime witnesses)
and highly complex results (as in creating an abstract image for the user). As design models, CUI
depends on implementation via applications and related services.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Vendor and open-source activity has been growing,
making it easier to develop CUIs. More is promised to come in both CUIs and new business models
that will shake up control of new UI paradigms to partly replace and supplement apps and APIs.
Recent CUI-relevant activity includes Alexa Skills Kits, better IBM Watson natural-language
capabilities, Facebook's Messenger Platform, Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Services and
numerous cloud-based natural-language processing (NLP) services and frameworks (such as
Google's SyntaxNet).
Most CUI implementations are still primitive, selecting responses via pattern matching and simple
decision trees. Increases in capabilities are largely due to improvements in natural-language
understanding (NLU) and speech recognition that make matching user input to the appropriate
output more effective. Leading bots today use human fallback to handle edge case queries. The
potential for CUI is enormous, although at present the hype is definitively higher than the
capabilities of actual implementations.
User Advice: Imagine the ultimate "clean screen" approach (or a no-screen approach as with
Amazon Echo and skill kits) — workable on a desktop, a large screen, tablet, phone or watch — a
blank screen with only one blank dialogue box to which the user can type or talk. It responds
meaningfully, retaining and reusing previous information from earlier dialogs with this user and often
asking qualifying questions before responding substantively to the user's wants or needs.

The need for literacy-related training and tools will significantly diminish during the next decade.
Plan on CUIs becoming the dominant model. By 2020, at least 40% of people working in new
applications will primarily interact with CUIs there, removing much of the perceived need to invest
further in improving "computer literacy."
Be wary of overcommitting to CUIs too deeply. Conversational interfaces can make machines
smarter and improve the ability of people to handle novel situations (people and machines
collaborating will be better than either alone). But they carry an extra burden as well. For well-
developed, repetitive skills that can be performed almost effortlessly, injecting conversation can
degrade performance unless the technology is able to recognize the repetitive patterns and able to
invoke many steps of a routine process with a single, user-generated command. We believe this
autoprogramming capability will be one of the most critical — but last to emerge — in
conversational interfaces.
(Avoid retrofitting CUI front ends to existing applications unless it improves usability and user
delight.)
Business Impact: This approach will appear primarily in new applications. Enterprise IT leaders
should be on the lookout for (and biased toward) CUIs to improve employee (and customer)
effectiveness as well as cut operating expenses and time spent learning arcane computer
semantics.
There will also be some retrofitting. Over the next five years, we do not expect large enterprises to
invest heavily in retrofitting existing systems of record where the employee base is experienced and
stable and the feature set well known to the user base. However, where there is employee turnover,
significant rapid changes in feature sets, or where enterprises face a continuing burden of providing
computer literacy training, enterprise IT leaders need to consider creating people-literate front ends
to make it easier for employees to adapt and excel.
Benefit Rating: Transformational
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Amazon; Baidu; Facebook; Google; IBM; IPsoft; Microsoft; NextIT; Salesforce
Recommended Reading: "Smart Agents Will Drive the Switch From Technology-Literate People, to
People-Literate Technology"
"Maverick* Research: Machines Will Talk to Each Other in English"
"Predicts 2016: Smart Machines"
Web Components
Analysis By: Ray Valdes; Danny Brian

Definition: The Web Components initiative is an HTML5 project that defines a browser-based
component architecture. This architecture allows user interface modules to be constructed and
maintained in a standards-oriented manner. The Web Components collection of standards
combines multiple proposed specifications, including HTML templates, custom elements, shadow
Document Object Model (DOM) and HTML imports.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Web Components is the latest in a history of attempts
to introduce standards for encapsulation and scoping to client-side code. This approach strives for
a vendor-independent, robust component model, improved developer productivity (through reliance
on declarative HTML rather than procedural JavaScript), cross-browser portability and high
performance (through built-in browser support). The subsystems that enable Web Components
include the shadow DOM and HTML templates, HTML imports, and custom elements.
All major browser vendors have implemented (or have started to implement) partial support for Web
Component features. As of May 2016, Chrome is the only browser to have native support for all four
Web Components standards. The polyfill library webcomponents.js (created by the Polymer team at
Google) supports all browsers back to Internet Explorer 9. Polyfill libraries implement Web
Component capability as an abstraction layer at the JavaScript level, not within the browser's
internal engine. Other major browser vendors are gradually implementing Web Components
features, the most recent being Apple's Safari. Despite lack of widespread support at the native
browser level, the high quality of the polyfill libraries means this should not be your primary criteria
for whether or not to begin using Web Components.
Developers don't need to build in a Web Components model in order to consume elements created
by others. The Custom Elements website provides a large directory of custom components that
developers can cut and paste into their own applications. Web Components can also be used to
build entire applications, where the application is broken down into small, functional pieces.
Componentization of client-side web code will have a significant impact on the way teams design
and build web applications.
User Advice:
■ Developers using legacy client-side technologies (such as jQuery) should learn and understand
the concept of client-side templating, RESTful web services and client-side MVC architecture.
■ Developers using older, client-side MVC frameworks (such as Backbone, Knockout and Ember)
should continue maintaining applications but should favor newer JavaScript frameworks that
provide a clear Web Components strategy, both in the building of components, and the
consumption of custom elements.
■ Web Components should be favored as the technique for building components that need to be
shared or distributed for reuse, or where multiple frameworks need to coexist in the same web
application.
Business Impact: Web Components promises to improve developer productivity, and allow rich
web applications to be built more quickly and maintained more effectively and at a lower cost.
Eventually, the Web Components standard is on the path to replacing server-side UI component

frameworks. However, achieving these goals will require increased complexity in browser
implementations, and carry some risks as to cross-browser compatibility, the testability of
applications and the emergence of an ecosystem of third-party components.
Maturity: Embryonic
Sample Vendors: AngularJS; CustomElements.io; DerbyJS; Ember; Google (Polymer Project);

Meteor; WebComponents.org
Recommended Reading: "Web Components and the Rise of Client-Side Architecture"
Full-Stack JavaScript
Analysis By: David Mitchell Smith
Definition: Full-stack JavaScript (aka "JavaScript everywhere") refers to the ubiquitous use of the
language significantly beyond its origin as a web browser component. JavaScript is an
implementation of ECMAScript, a specification developed by the Ecma International standards
body. Netscape, the browser pioneer of the web era, created JavaScript. Designed to be a scripting
language for the Netscape browser, it quickly took on a much bigger role as the browser wars led
the industry into the dot-com boom.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: A mainstream component of web technologies,

JavaScript has a long history as a successful browser scripting language. It continues to grow as a
popular option for server-side processing, especially in cloud environments. Although various
implementations of server-side JavaScript have been available for years, the concept has gained
significant traction with the introduction of Node.js in 2009. Gartner predicted the rise of server-side
JavaScript in our 2006 research, "What's Next With Web 2.0 and Consumerization?"
JavaScript has also become commonly used in mobile app development platforms (MADPs) and
cloud mobile back-end services. It is being used not only in web and hybrid development, but also
increasingly as the mobile development language where other web technologies play a minor, if any,
role. In addition, cloud mobile back-end service offerings increasingly offer server-side (often
Node.js)-based environments. The ubiquity of the language is also increasing its role in testing
environments. JavaScript also is part of many open-source software (OSS) offerings and strategies.
Full-stack JavaScript is an environment that unifies client and server/cloud development via an
integrated framework. This type of offering is particularly well-suited for what Gartner calls "cloud/
client computing" (see "Cloud/Client: Where Cloud Meets Mobile and the Nexus of Forces").
JavaScript is becoming more strategic to vendors and is a part of the offerings of most platform as
a service (PaaS) implementations.
"JavaScript everywhere" should not be taken literally. There will be many languages, and
JavaScript, while increasingly popular, will not be the best language for all use cases. Also, use of

JavaScript as a programming language and as a runtime is not the same — there are higher-level
languages, such as TypeScript, which produce JavaScript.
User Advice:
■ Pursue developers with JavaScript mastery. Today, most JavaScript knowledge is shallow, and
deep expertise will be needed.
■ Treat JavaScript experience and expertise as critical knowledge for all web and most mobile
developers. IT leaders should qualify web programmer candidates who claim JavaScript
expertise.
■ Use of JavaScript often needs investment in frameworks and tools. Evaluate OSS options as
well as JavaScript capabilities in commercial vendor offerings.
Business Impact: The emergence of a language that is common across systems, while not
guaranteeing complete portability, does create opportunities. The opportunities range from vendors
seeking leadership in products and services to opportunities provided to businesses that aim to
exploit the capabilities. A major driver of interest in full-stack JavaScript is for the benefits of
portability: not just portability of code across browsers, but also potentially to servers (cloud/client)
and, more importantly, portability of skills. Being able to use the same language on the client and
server sides enables developers to leverage the code and their skills. Portability and simplicity are
key drivers of interest in JavaScript. JavaScript is well-entrenched in browsers and becoming de
facto in mobile, making portability and compatibility with it easier than trying to utilize server
languages within client environments, especially on the web.
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: Appcelerator; IBM; Kony; Meteor; Microsoft
Recommended Reading: "JavaScript: Past, Present and Future"
At the Peak
Web-Scale Application Architecture

Analysis By: Massimo Pezzini
Definition: Web-scale application architecture is an advanced style of application design that

applies a combination of five key tenets: application logic parallelization, in-memory data
management, partitioning, multinode data replication, and asynchronous, event-driven
communication between system and application components. This architecture is adopted for
applications with exceptionally demanding performance, scalability, availability, security,
manageability and dependability requirements such as cloud services and global-class applications.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Typically, web-scale-application-architecture-based
applications leverage commodity hardware, web technologies, distributed data architectures, in-
memory computing, event-processing technologies and cloud-style scale-out deployment
topologies. However, an application is not qualified as web-scale application-architecture-based by
the use of any specific technology, but by the adoption of a combination of the five definitional
design tenets to support digital business scenarios characterized by high transaction volumes,
continuous availability and fast response time. Web-scale applications are at times based on a
microservice architecture, which applies some of the web-scale application architecture principles
plus additional constrains.
Increasingly, cloud and digital business applications are generating extraordinary pressure on
conventional application architectures for greater scalability and 24/7 availability. Therefore, a
growing number of user organizations and global-class SaaS providers (for example, Workday) have
notably endorsed the web-scale application architecture principles.
Deployment of web-scale applications has been increasing in financial services, online

entertainment, transportation and logistics, online advertisement, IoT application, and cloud
services. But web-scale application architecture adoption will grow relatively slowly due to the need
for user organizations to familiarize with this new style of application design, build up the relevant
skills, and internalize the appropriate best practices and enabling technologies.
User Advice: CTOs should take into consideration that web-scale application architecture
applications can be implemented using combinations of traditional enterprise application servers,
IMC technologies (for example, in-memory data grids and high-performance messaging
infrastructure), event-based programming frameworks (for example, Scala/Akka), advanced Java
Virtual Machines (for example, Azul Systems' Zing), event-driven application platforms (for example,
function PaaS such as Amazon Web Services Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Iron.io
IronWorker) and "eventually consistent" transaction processing engines (for example, Atomikos).
These individual technologies are rapidly maturing, and web-scale application architecture adoption
by independent software vendors (ISVs) and SaaS providers continues to grow. Some advanced
PaaS providers offer platforms that are suitable for web-scale application architecture applications,
but there are only a few on-premises application platforms that deliver a comprehensive set of web-
scale-application-architecture-enabling capabilities.
Therefore, CTOs and other IT leaders involved in global-class, digital business initiatives should
strategically adopt web-scale application architecture for their high-scale, high-performance and
high-availability applications for public and private cloud deployments.
However, they should also consider that industry experience with web-scale application architecture
design, implementation, deployment and maintenance is limited to selected industry sectors.
Relevant design and implementation skills are still hard to find, and system integrators (SIs) have
limited capacity in terms of relevant know-how. Moreover, in many cases, CTOs will have to
aggregate a web-scale-application-architecture-suitable application platform in a piecemeal fashion
— a nontrivial system integration work that requires very specific competencies and skills.
Business Impact: Web-scale application architecture support for high performance, scalability and
availability is vital for initiatives such as global web commerce, advanced multitenant SaaS, cloud

services, social software, online gaming and entertainment, online advertisement, online travel
reservation systems, and other global-class applications that are aimed at supporting thousands (if
not millions) of users.
In industries like telecom, financial services and healthcare, organizations are experiencing
explosive growth in the workload they must sustain due to mobile apps, globalization, the Internet
of Things and other factors. The extremely competitive nature of these businesses requires support
for ultra-high-end requirements on top of the low-cost, commodity-hardware-based settings at the
core of web-scale computing.
Usually, the temporary unavailability of a social network, an online gaming service, online
advertising or a web commerce site is not catastrophic for end users; however, it has a dramatic
impact on service providers. A few minutes of unavailability, multiplied by hundreds of thousands or
millions of users, may have a notable negative impact on a company's revenue, reputation and
competitiveness.
In many businesses, adoption of web-scale application architecture will be imperative to cost-

effectively ensure reliable, flexible and efficient operations; to offer customers a delightful
experience; to sustain growth; and, ultimately, to remain competitive.
Sample Vendors: Amazon Web Services; Atomikos; Azul Systems; Caucho; CloudTran;
GigaSpaces Technologies; Gnubila; Google; Iron.io; Lightbend
Recommended Reading: "In-Memory Data Grids Enable Global-Class Web and Mobile
Applications (While Not Bankrupting Your Company)"
Cloud Citizen Integrator Services (iSaaS)

Analysis By: Massimo Pezzini
Definition: Cloud citizen integrator services, also known as integration SaaS (iSaaS), provide
integration tools and cloud-based prepackaged and configurable integration flows ("cloudstreams")
aimed at helping consumers and business users solve simple application and data integration
issues. iSaaS value proposition is that integration tasks can be carried out by business users with
minimal IT skills ("citizen integrators") and without support from professional developers or
integration specialists.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: iSaaS offerings address simple "personal" integration
issues (often referred to as "automation") that business users face every day (for example, updating
their customer contacts). iSaaS enables any business user (and consumer), even with minimal IT

skills, to turn into a citizen integrator who can customize available cloudstreams or build new
integration flows.
The insatiable need for integration driven by social networks, mobile apps, cloud services and, more
and more, the Internet of Things (IoT), is fertile ground for the growth of iSaaS offerings. The ever-
expanding availability of public APIs encourages development of a growing number of cloudstreams
and further favors iSaaS adoption by users.
Many established integration platform (iPaaS or on-premises) providers have launched iSaaS
offerings or have added iSaaS-like capabilities to their products. Some pure play iSaaS providers
have introduced functionality of interest to central IT teams, such as support for on-premises
applications and data sources, on-premises platform deployment, and monitoring and management
capabilities. These strategies will make iSaaS more appealing for IT organizations, thus further
accelerating iSaaS adoption.
Although iSaaS is quite popular in the SMB space, its use by midsize and large organizations has
just begun. This may lead to disappointments among business users and central IT departments
because of excessive expectations for ultra-easy integration. In any case, it will take several years
for iSaaS to saturate a market of tens (if not hundreds) of millions of potential users.
User Advice: Over the past 12 months, the number of iSaaS offerings has grown notably, while their
collective user bases amount to millions of individuals, list hundreds of available cloudstreams, and
run tens of millions of integration tasks per month. This all indicates a growing level of maturity for
these offerings.
In most organizations, business users will, sooner or later, get to use cloud citizen integrator
services. This will inevitably lead to security, compliance and management issues that, at some
point, CTOs and directors of integration will have to deal with, despite many providers' still limited
support for enterprise requirements. Therefore, CTOs and directors of integration, especially those
moving toward an adaptive and/or bimodal approach to integration, should take the following
actions:
■ Proactively evaluate, recommend and possibly procure an approved, certified and supported
iSaaS, to be made available to internal users via a self-service user experience. This will help
prevent the proliferation of similar services within organizations, influence the provider's
roadmap, and maintain a degree of control and monitoring (for example, by asking the provider
for visibility into the organization's employees who subscribed to the service, or by integrating
the provider's monitoring environment with enterprise governance processes).
■ Give preference to integration platform (for example, iPaaS) providers that plan to support
citizen integrator requirements.
■ Frame your iSaaS plans in broader hybrid integration platform (HIP) strategies aimed at
supporting bimodal approaches to the "any to any," pervasive integration challenges posed by
digital transformation initiatives.

■ Realistically assess when iSaaS is an appropriate tool for the needs of your organization and
when the use of more established integration platforms is to be preferred for requirements
complexity, performance, security, availability, or any other reason.
Business Impact: Well-managed adoption of cloud citizen integrator services will reduce security
and compliance risks, and improve productivity by enabling business users to automate, in a
controlled way, business tasks that are currently integrated manually or using a variety of
unmanaged tools.
iSaaS offerings are also sometimes a better choice for integration specialists to quickly address
certain simple integration needs (instead of using more sophisticated tools) or, conversely, to
delegate responsibility for these tasks to less skilled IT or non-IT personnel. This can free up time for
specialists to focus on the more challenging requirements of integration.
Combined with iPaaS, API management and on-premises integration platform in a HIP iSaaS is an
enabler for digital transformation initiatives by supporting fast pervasive integration across on-
premises, cloud and mobile applications and data sources and "things."
Sample Vendors: Adeptia; IBM; IFTTT; MuleSoft; OneSaas; Scribe Software; SnapLogic; TIBCO
Software; Workato; Zapier
Recommended Reading: "Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape,

2016"
"Market Guide for Citizen Integrator Tools"
DXPs (formerly UXPs)

Definition: A digital experience platform (DXP), formerly known as a user experience platform
(UXP), is a rationalized, integrated set of technologies used to provide digital interaction between a
user and a set of applications, processes, content, services or other users. DXP frameworks
evolved from portals and WCM, yet differ from them with a broad collection of supporting services
(e.g., app/API framework, search, analytics, collaboration, social, mobile and UX framework) that
typically live outside the scope of a traditional portal and WCM products.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The concept of the DXP emerged in 2009 when it
became evident that traditional approaches for creating web, portal and mobile assets were not
meeting end-user or IT needs, and independent software vendors started delivering platforms for
creating the digital experience. A DXP is primarily a platform for enterprises to use. They may create
the platform themselves or purchase it as a suite of products or as a single product. The most

common deployment model is to obtain the core of the enterprise DXP from a single vendor, while
supplementing that core with multiple technologies, products and components from third-party
vendors or open source. The DXP market continues to evolve, and more traditional portal and WCM
vendors are emerging with DXP offerings. In spite of enterprise desire for an engagement platform,
user demand for DXPs is still on the low side, mainly due to lack of knowledge of the concept and
the marketplace.
Targeting the right platform for creating digital experiences isn't an easy task for enterprise IT. Due
to the slow pace of end-user adoption, DXPs remain to the left of the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
There is much more hype left to be generated.
User Advice: Conduct an inventory of the various tools used for presentation management and
presentation layer composition across all supported devices and channels. Determine synergies
where common vendors are identified. Demand plans from your vendors for their products and
determine where integration will occur. Explore DXP options for many of these tools, then build a
roadmap and plan to adopt a DXP during the next few years.
Determine whether your needs for websites and portal sites would best be met by suite-oriented
portal products/DXPs or by lean portals.
If you already have most of the components of a DXP and are happy with them, fill in any gaps and
continue with a "roll your own" approach. If you are lacking major components, consider a DXP
product as the source for those missing components. If you don't have much of a platform, or don't
like most of the components you are using, consider a full DXP product from a DXP vendor.
Business Impact: Inconsistent user experiences and a different look/feel/behavior across sites and
devices create poor customer experiences. Additionally, customer engagement is delivered in siloes
by most enterprises. These siloes, which are based on brand, product, geography or CRM pillar,
lead to very poor customer experiences. A DXP provides significant efficiencies in developing and
maintaining the user experience, many times including tools supporting UX design and
methodologies, and provides a consistent user experience across sites, channels and devices.
DXPs may save organizations money, but the main benefit is the ability to more effectively and
rapidly engage users and customers.
The DXP addresses the enterprise need for a consistent, integrated, versatile and optimized
approach to user interactions across a wide range of engagement scenarios, audiences, channels
and devices. The preintegrated nature of DXP products means faster time to market and lower
deployment costs.
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Adobe; Backbase; IBM; Liferay; Microsoft; Oracle; Oxcyon; Salesforce; SAP;
Sitecore

Recommended Reading: "Market Guide for User Experience Platforms"
"Market Trends: Unification of the User Experience Platform Marketplace"
Microservices
Analysis By: Anne Thomas
Definition: A microservice is a tightly scoped, strongly encapsulated, loosely coupled,

independently deployable and independently scalable application component. Based on a
combination of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and domain-driven design (DDD), microservice
architecture (MSA) is a design paradigm that has three core objectives: development agility,
deployment flexibility and precise scalability.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Leading digital business organizations, such as
Netflix, Amazon and eBay, started building systems using MSA a few years ago, but the term
"microservice" didn't start to gain traction until early 2014. Now, it is one of the hottest buzzwords in
application architecture circles. And yet, it is the subject of much debate: What is a microservice? Is
it defined by its size, or something else? Do you need to adopt new patterns and infrastructure to
use them? What's the difference between MSA and ordinary SOA? Some vendors are contributing
to the debate by microservice-washing their products. Many people have started calling any shared
service a microservice. This confusion muddies the water because ordinary SOA does not deliver
the same agility and scalability benefits as MSA.
To achieve the MSA benefits of continuous delivery and web-scale scalability, development teams
must adopt significantly different design patterns and application infrastructure, and they will need
to make significant changes to organization structures, roles and responsibilities, and governance
practices. These changes will be too disruptive for many organizations, and as a result,
microservices are destined to fall quickly into the Trough of Disillusionment. Many organizations are
likely to abandon efforts to adopt the MSA. More likely, they will adopt a less disruptive and less
beneficial approach to dismantling their monolithic applications: an approach that Gartner calls
"miniservices."
User Advice: For CIOs, CTOs and chief architects:
■ MSA imposes a significant learning curve, and it requires discipline and commitment:
■ Agile development methodologies, DevOps and continuous delivery practices are MSA
prerequisites. Cloud computing, particularly platform as a service (PaaS) or container as a
service (CaaS), goes hand in hand with microservices.
■ MSA purists build microservices by using the DDD philosophy and design patterns, including
bounded context, event sourcing and command query responsibility segregation (CQRS). Your
architects and developers may not be familiar with this paradigm, and they will need training.
■ For the moment, MSA is done mostly by hand. Developers can use almost any service
development framework to build microservices. (Each feature team can use a different language
and framework, if they like.) The challenging part is managing and coordinating microservice

interdependencies. MSA simplifies the implementation of individual services, but the entire
distributed application creates a more complex operational environment. Dependencies must
be explicit, and interface contracts must be solid.
■ MSA requires a new runtime infrastructure. Currently, most teams working with MSA rely on an
assortment of open-source technologies to coordinate development, deployment and operation
of microservices. Be prepared to handcraft a solid microservice infrastructure.
■ MSA also impacts organizational responsibilities: Microservice feature teams should "own" their
microservices — from design to support. DevOps operators must learn new software packaging
and life cycle management techniques.
Microservices are not for everyone:
■ Many organizations don't have extreme agility and scalability requirements, and, therefore, don't
need to adopt this type of disruptive architecture. These organizations can derive adequate
benefits using the less disruptive miniservice model.
■ Organizations with extreme agility and scalability requirements should adopt MSA in its purest
form, including DDD, event sourcing and CQRS. Each microservice should be as independent
as possible — independently developed, tested and deployed. It should own its own data. It
should communicate asynchronously. It should be self-contained: That is, it is deployed directly
to an OS container or virtual machine rather than to an application server — typically to a PaaS
or CaaS environment.
■ Organizations that are implementing a continuous delivery practice should investigate using
MSA to facilitate the practice.
■ Organizations that are not using agile development methodologies and DevOps should invest in
improving their development practices before adopting microservices.
Business Impact: MSA is a key enabling innovation for digital business pursuits. MSA enables
business agility: Developers can rapidly implement and deploy new features according to business
demands, rather than application development schedules. MSA also enables scalability. Most
organizations that have adopted MSA have done so to accommodate massive growth in their digital
business initiatives. As platform vendors build out microservice frameworks, this architectural model
and its agility and scalability benefits will become more accessible to a broader audience.
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Amazon Web Services; Lightbend; Microsoft; Netflix; Nirmata; Pivotal; WSO2
Recommended Reading: "Innovation Insight for Microservices"
"Assessing Microservices for Cloud-Native Application Architecture and Delivery"

"Using Kubernetes to Orchestrate Docker Container-Based Cloud and Microservices Applications"
"Orchestrating Docker Container-Based Cloud and Microservices Applications"
Server-Side JavaScript
Definition: Server-side JavaScript refers to the use of the JavaScript language on back-end servers
and in the cloud. This is not the most common use of the language, as JavaScript's most common
use has been in the delivery of cross-browser Web applications. JavaScript's origin is as a browser-
scripting language.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: JavaScript has a long history as a successful
browser-scripting language — a potent role that its association with HTML5 is solidifying. Although
various implementations of server-side JavaScript have been available for years, the concept began
to gain traction with the introduction of Node.js in 2009. Node (along with simple event processing)
has been a catalyst for the realization of some JavaScript benefits as a server-side technology.
Gartner predicted the rise of server-side JavaScript in our 2006 research "What's Next With Web 2.0
and Consumerization?"
Node.js is an open-source, server-side implementation of JavaScript, mated with an event-oriented

runtime engine for high-performance computing. Node.js runtime support is available in most
aPaaS offerings, and it plays a significant role in strategies from IBM, Microsoft and other major
vendors. JavaScript was chosen as the language for Node.js because of its ability to support
asynchronous processing and the relative uniqueness of JavaScript as a language defined entirely
by an open specification (ECMAScript). Node.js has been created and used with enthusiasm by
cutting-edge Web developers. Its presence in PaaS and mobile offerings is poised to increase
enterprise adoption.
A common criticism of JavaScript is that it is too forgiving and has enabled some poor
programming practices. In the past, there have been performance issues, although this is much less
of an issue today. However, much of the criticism is rooted in prejudice against scripting languages
as being not good enough for "real work." Such attitudes are moderating but are still significant in
the traditional object-oriented programming (OOP) community accustomed to heavier and more-
structured tools like Java and .NET. Beyond the OOP community, such attitudes are fortunately
waning, because most Web developers are increasingly using other scripting languages. In addition,
on the server, one need not maintain backward-compatibility and thus can upgrade and use new
language features much earlier than in the browser. For things like ECMAScript 6, this is important
as it addresses some forgiving aspects of JavaScript and builds in features to make it more suitable
for larger codebases.
Server-side JavaScript is a very popular language for use in back-end mobile cloud service
implementations. Beyond the popularity of Node.js, this use will have the most market and business
impact as mobile and cloud continue to become more mainstream in IT.
User Advice:

■ Application development (AD) leaders should monitor the evolution of Node.js and ensure that
strategic commitments are matched with environments for which there is a clear fit and projects
will be programmed by qualified programmers.
■ Treat JavaScript experience and expertise as critical knowledge for all Web developers. IT
leaders should qualify Web programmer candidates who claim JavaScript expertise.
Business Impact: A major driver of interest in server-side JavaScript is portability: not just
portability of code across browsers, but also potentially to servers (cloud/client) and, more
importantly, the portability of skills. Being able to use the same language on the client and server
sides enables developers to leverage the code and their skills. Portability and simplicity are key
drivers of interest in JavaScript. Server-side JavaScript is primarily used in conjunction with client-
side, rather than in place of it.
Trends such as digital business and the IoT lead to an environment where more logic will reside on
clients and the majority will be written with JavaScript. This is a result not just of the current
prevalence of Web browser applications on the desktop, but also of expected growth in mobile as a
"modern Web" component. An increase in hybrid mobile app development will also increase the use
of JavaScript.
Sample Vendors: IBM; Joyent; Microsoft
Recommended Reading: "JavaScript: Past, Present and Future"
High-Performance JavaScript
Analysis By: Ray Valdes; Danny Brian
Definition: High-performance JavaScript refers to various scenarios in which JavaScript —

traditionally a low-performance interpreted language valued for its flexibility and learnability rather
than for its performance — is used in performance-intensive situations such as real-time games.
The primary technique is asm.js. Alternative performance-oriented approaches include Dart,
WebGL, NaCl and WebAssembly.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Client-side JavaScript is widely used for websites and
applications that are dynamic, interactive, easily modified, and built quickly. It is typically not used in
situations where performance is a priority.
Various mechanisms now enable JavaScript to be part of a high-performance system, such as a

real-time game engine. One approach is asm.js, which compiles source code (typically C or C++)
not into machine language, but into a narrow subset of JavaScript that can be processed in an
efficient manner by the browser's resident JavaScript engine. No plug-ins are required. Depending

on the browser and JavaScript engine, the code can be fully compiled upon initial load rather than
waiting for the interpreter to process this (as is done by just-in-time compilation).
Large and complex code bases (such as the C++ code for the Unreal game engine), have been
compiled into asm.js with surprisingly positive results. The improvement over interpretation is about
4x to 10x, and only 2x slower than compiled C or C++ code. In addition to asm.js, there are other
approaches that result in high-performance JavaScript-related systems, browser-based
applications, such as WebGL or Dart (a performance-oriented dialect of JavaScript), NaCl (a
sandboxing mechanism to run binary code inside the browser), and WebAssembly (a binary format
executed by the browser, compiled from a range of languages, not just JavaScript, which is now in
the early stages of adoption).
User Advice:
■ Developers seeking high performance in a JavaScript-based system should consider asm.js.

■ Developers seeking to port legacy C or C++ code to the web should consider asm.js as well as
NaCL, and, as it matures, WebAssembly.
Business Impact: The impact of high-performance JavaScript will be found in specialty or niche
sectors, rather than becoming mainstream across the industry. Nevertheless, for those situations
where JavaScript is required (over some other language like Java), where plug-ins are not allowed,
and where there is a mass of legacy C/C++ code to port to the web, the impact of high-
performance JavaScript will be large.
Sample Vendors: Google; Microsoft; Mozilla
Tag Management
Analysis By: Martin Kihn
Definition: Tag management systems simplify the deployment and maintenance of JavaScript and
other tags that are used to exchange data between online and mobile content, and between
external applications, such as analytics, advertising and personalization. One tag replaces all others,
which then controls publishing of the appropriate tags and related data flows. This decouples tag
operations from marketing requirements, usually increasing deployment and website speed. It can
also improve data management.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Tag management solutions appeared almost a
decade ago and saw a rapid rise of market acceptance over the past four years. Increased usage is
due to support for more tag-based vendors; marketing's aversion to IT-driven release cycles; free
and bundled solutions from Adobe Systems, Google and IBM; and an increased awareness of the

benefits. Gartner estimates that more than two-thirds of larger e-commerce companies — and a
growing number of players in other industries — use a tag management system. Tag management
systems from Google, Tealium, Ensighten and Signal (formerly BrightTag) ranked in the top tag
deployments, as reported by the tracking firm Ghostery.
Due to competition from increasingly capable bundled solutions such as Google's Tag Manager, the
leading enterprise tag management vendors are moving up-market, adding premium features and
carving out slightly different strategic ground. Ensighten acquired an analytics company and
launched a site performance monitoring product. Tealium stresses its role as a neutral "operating
system," furnishing a continuously updated data layer that can power applications such as analytics
and execution systems from a range of providers. Similarly, Signal touts its ability to process event
data in real time and pass it along to other systems.
Despite their well-documented benefits, tag management systems continue to face some obstacles
to broader adoption. One is the difficult problem of redirection, whereby authorized tags can redirect
to unauthorized tags in ways that are hard to detect and harder to police. This leads to the potential
for data leakage, increased website latency and other issues. A more potent obstacle is the
onslaught of mobile devices, which do not usually employ traditional tags but rather rely on software
development kits for data collection in ways that are not easily supported by tag management
systems (most now offer some support).
Although tag management has compelling benefits for website and campaign management
providers, including some mentioned above, envision expanding their scope to cover virtually all
elements of online data collection across the enterprise. Marketers with elevated expectations are at
risk of suffering disillusionment as they confront the scale and scope of challenges associated with
marketing profile and master data management. For these reasons, the Hype Cycle positioning has
been moved past the Peak of Inflated Expectations and closer to the Trough of Disillusionment.
User Advice: The value of using a tag management system is in having a central way to create, edit
and publish tags, no matter where or how the content that contains the master tag is published.
Marketers that use tag management systems often see an improvement in website and mobile app
performance, and easier data collection and management. This enables the combination of data
from different sources for further analysis using a common data model and metadata. Tag
management should be considered when multiple tags are deployed, custom variables are added to
tags, frequent changes to tag configurations are being made, or rules about when the tag should
fire are required.
One market for tag management systems is the digital marketing practitioner, struggling to manage
these tags for multiple web analytic products, surveys, content, and multivariate testing and
recommendation engines. A second market is publishers and advertising buyers, who use tags to
track users across websites and understand behaviors and responses to digital content and
advertising. And a third market includes agencies and other service partners who have a role
managing marketing's owned properties and multichannel campaigns.
Business Impact: The impact on businesses is increased due to the more sophisticated use of tags
for analysis, advertising and optimization of customer-facing content and applications. This leads to
better business results from digital channels. Using the common data model makes it easier for

developers to add metadata to content. Quality problems and bottlenecks in making changes to the
tags and metadata that feed them can inhibit the use of optimization products. Excessive tag
volume can slow page loading times. Where government regulations require better privacy
protection for users, some tag management vendors offer a foundation to control what is captured.
Tag management providers are expected to continue pushing to become broader data management
systems. In time, stand-alone tag management systems will likely cease to exist. They will either be
acquired and turned into a feature of marketing hubs, multichannel campaign management and
other platforms, or transformed into (or merged with) broader platforms to provide a data
management layer for marketing.
Sample Vendors: Adobe Systems; Ensighten; Google; IBM; npm (Signal.IO); Qubit; Tealium
Recommended Reading: "How to Choose a Provider for Tag Management"
"Guide to the Data Ops Neighborhood on Gartner's Digital Marketing Transit Map"
Web Real-Time Communications

Analysis By: Mike Fasciani
Definition: Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) is an open-source project that delivers voice
and video communications directly to a browser and mobile applications using simple JavaScript
APIs.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: A primary goal of the WebRTC standard is to enable
websites and web applications to deliver real-time communications, irrespective of the browser
being used. The WebRTC groups in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) are working to define a set of protocols and standard codecs that provide
real-time communications in web browsers and the associated set of JavaScript APIs for web
integration. While there is consensus on which voice codecs will be supported in WebRTC, there
has been some contention over which video codecs to utilize — VP8 and/or H.264. The latest draft
of the standard mandates support for both, but this contention, along with the next generation of
codecs — VP9 and H.265 — will impact the speed at which WebRTC will be adopted. Chrome,
Firefox, and Opera have embedded WebRTC into their browsers and Microsoft launched object
real-time communications (ORTC), a variant of the WebRTC definition, in the Edge browser in 4Q15.
Microsoft has made no announcements about supporting real-time communications in the Internet
Explorer browser, however. Apple has shown signs of supporting WebRTC in the Safari browser, but
has not yet made an official statement on market availability. So the standardization activity
continues and is not expected to be fully adopted in 2016.

The migration to WebRTC will be evolutionary over many years (versus revolutionary in one to two
years). Many communications vendors have launched WebRTC functionality, including Cisco Spark,
Unify Circuit and several web-conferencing services. Currently, enterprise adoption is occurring
through the use of primarily web- and videoconferencing services from providers that have adopted
browser-based delivery, as well as in-contact center solutions where agents are able to
communicate with customers through their company's web page.
User Advice: Though not yet fully standardized, communications vendors are adding WebRTC into
their suite of solutions. Contact center, web conferencing, and videoconferencing are the leading
communications applications as the early adopters of WebRTC implementations. Contact centers
that adopt the ability to extend interactive voice and video on their applications, will have a
competitive advantage over those that require the customer to place a call from a phone without
insight into the customer's browser history or an ability to provide a rich-media customer
engagement. For enterprises who use web- and videoconferencing services regularly, it is desirable
to use WebRTC-enabled conferencing services that allow attendees to join the meeting without
having to download software to their PCs and mobile devices to join. When running these types of
real-time applications in the browser, the feature set is not as robust as can be found in solutions
with installed PC software; however, the convenience factor improves the ease of deployment for IT
engineers and makes it easier for users to join the meetings. For enterprises looking to add
WebRTC usage to reduce the cost of installing and managing softphones, E-SBC vendors have
added mediation capabilities between WebRTC and SIP to allow endpoints of both types to network
and interoperate for voice and video calling.
WebRTC will utilize G.711, G.722, iSAC, iLBC and Opus audio codecs. The wideband and adaptive
codecs will provide a high-quality user experience, delivered over best-effort networks, where end-
to-end quality of service (QoS) cannot be guaranteed. Enterprises should expect that WebRTC will
become robust enough in the coming years for general use in communication applications.
Business Impact: The benefit for enterprises of WebRTC is that voice and video interactions can
occur natively within web applications versus a user having to open up a new communication
application or call from a phone. With embedded voice and video, the application can add
contextual information, enabling a richer communication experience. Click-to-call applications, for
example, will migrate away from proprietary methods to the WebRTC standard, and contact center
agents will be able to see exactly what callers are looking at on their screens. Within contact center
operations and communications-enabled business processes, WebRTC can create browser pages
as real-time communications objects to be used in workflow, e-commerce and business process
applications. As such, WebRTC will potentially transform the communications industry since no
specialized software is needed to access communications.
Traditional software vendors are utilizing WebRTC as a low-cost way of entering the real-time voice
and video communications market, which will further drive new functionality, along with price
competition. WebRTC enables over-the-top (OTT) voice and video operators to deliver their internet
services at a lower cost, compared with the legacy public switched telephone network (PSTN). As
WebRTC matures, the expectation is for high-quality voice and video communication to be tightly
integrated with business applications that can be consumed by any smart device.

Sample Vendors: Aspect; Cisco; Firefox; Google; Opera; Oracle; Twilio; Unify; Vidyo; Zoom
Recommended Reading: "Prepare for WebRTC's Impact on Enterprise UCC"
"Cool Vendors in Unified Communications, 2016"
"Predicts 2016: UCC Will Thrive With Web Standards, Commodity and Cloud"
"Market Guide for Enterprise SBC"
HTTP/2
Analysis By: Ray Valdes; David Mitchell Smith
Definition: HTTP/2 (formerly HTTP 2.0) is the next-generation successor to HTTP 1.1, the protocol
that governs the transfer of documents between servers and clients on the World Wide Web. The
intent of HTTP/2 is to address perceived problems in performance and efficiency, and possibly to
provide enhanced security as well — at the expense of what some critics consider unnecessary
complexity.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The HTTP/2 specification was published by Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF), an HTTP Working Group in May 2015. The IETF group published two
formal RFC standards, one on HTTP/2 (RFC 7540) and the other on a specification for compressing
HTTP/2 headers called HPACK. This has been followed by the usual long process of adoption by
browsers, servers and websites. Recent versions of all major browsers support HTTP/2. Toward the
end of 2015, major web providers like CloudFlare and publishers like WordPress.com added
support. In the first half of 2016, Dropbox, Wikipedia and Blogspot added support as well.
The major improvements offered by HTTP/2 over HTTP/1.x are: multiplexed requests across a
single TCP connection (so that parallel communication can occur over a single connection), header
compression, server push (servers can push responses proactively into client caches), bidirectional
streaming, flow control and a shift away from text-based protocol to use of a more efficient binary
format. HTTP/2 eliminates "head of line" blocking, where one request can be outstanding on a given
connection at a given time. HTTP/2 preserves the semantics of HTTP 1.x, to enable interoperability
between the two generations of protocol. While HTTP/2 has a clearer specification of security
profiles, the standard does not require encryption (although some implementations do).
HTTP/2 is based on an earlier initiative by Google, called SPDY, which meant to improve
performance of the HTTP/1.x protocol. SPDY was implemented by Google and adopted by Mozilla
browser and Nginx web server with good results. The IETF HTTP Working Group included SPDY
contributors as well as engineers from Microsoft, Akamai, curl and Twitter. In February 2015, Google
announced it will phase out SPDY in favor of HTTP/2. At this writing, this was scheduled for end of
May 2016.

Another related development is HTML5 WebSockets. While HTTP/2 makes synchronous HTTP-style
communications faster, WebSockets enables two-way live communications. HTTP/2 is designed for
maximum compatibility with existing web applications, while WebSockets is intended for a future
generation of interactive, bidirectional applications, such as real-time chat. There is also Quick UDP
Internet Connections (QUIC), which is roughly similar to HTTP/2 except it builds on the low-level
UDP protocol rather than TCP. Although there is overlap between QUIC and HTTP/2, they can be
viewed as complementary. QUIC implements a better transport layer underneath HTTP (and other
protocols). QUIC enables an implementation of secure HTTP/2 API over UDP rather than over
TCP/IP as the bottom-most transport layer. The QUIC approach significantly reduces the round-trip
time (RTT) and number of back-and-forth interactions between two nodes in order to initiate an
encrypted exchange of data. Reducing RTT in connection setup results in a greater improvement of
page load times compared to increasing bandwidth of a connection.
User Advice: Website managers and developers should track the adoption of HTTP/2 and be
prepared to implement support for it as adoption grows over the next two years.
Be careful with enabling HTTP/2 for everything, especially for user populations with diverse
browsers. Because HTTP/2 is still new, some clients/libraries and server implementations are not
fully compatible and need to mature further.
It is now well-known that slow page load times can have significant negative impact on user
experience and, in the case of e-commerce sites, negative impact on revenue. Developers should
not wait for foundation-level improvements in protocols to optimize page load speeds. There is now
an established set of techniques and practices for optimizing pages that developers should
consider, beginning with tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Yahoo YSlow.
However, be aware that some techniques for making websites perform quickly in HTTP/1.x are
counterproductive in HTTP/2. For example, domain sharing of page element loading across multiple
connections and inlining of images in HTML streams, spriting and file concatenation are techniques
that are worthwhile in HTTP/1.x, but not useful in HTTP/2.
Business Impact: Three areas can benefit from an improved HTTP: existing websites that are in
competitive sectors and need maximum performance, mobile-oriented sites that need efficient use
of bandwidth while preserving battery life, and applications that offer a real-time live experience.
Sites that have implemented HTTP2, such as Dropbox, have seen a significant reduction in the
incoming traffic bandwidth, due to more efficient header compression (HPACK).
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Google; Kaazing; Microsoft; Mozilla; Opera; Yahoo

WebGL
Analysis By: Ray Valdes
Definition: WebGL is a standards-based method for rendering 3D graphics in a web browser

without plug-ins. The mechanism is closely aligned with the long-established OpenGL standard
(specifically OpenGL ES 2.0) and, depending on configuration, allows web applications to directly
access high-performance graphics hardware.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: For years, desktop-class machines have been
accompanied by graphics hardware that supports 3D graphics APIs such as Direct3D and OpenGL.
This powerful hardware has not been available to web applications in a standards-based manner —
that does not require plug-ins — until the advent of WebGL.
WebGL uses the HTML5 Canvas element and Document Object Model. It supports custom shaders
written in a C-like OpenGL shading language. The result is a way for web applications to
incorporate high-performance, rich 3D experiences. This capability is most directly useful not only in
real-time games, but also in architecture, e-commerce and even as enhancements to traditional GUI
elements such as menus and buttons.
There have been various obstacles that are now mostly overcome, including the lack of broad-
based support, stability and maturity of implementations, interoperability and toolset support. One
challenge has been the incompatibility between WebGL and Direct3D (a competitor to OpenGL)
advanced by Microsoft and supported by many hardware manufacturers. However, this is partially
addressed by compatibility layers.
Microsoft has, with its Internet Explorer 11 browser, provided WebGL support that is largely
compatible with other implementations. Microsoft had previously expressed concerns with WebGL
(in contrast to its own Direct3D technology) about its security and performance. These concerns
seem to have been alleviated by the continued evolution of the specification.
User Advice:
■ Developers seeking cross-platform "pure-browser" mechanisms for delivering high-

performance, rich 3D experiences should consider WebGL. The specification has matured and
its support broadened, so that it can be considered a viable alternative for situations where use
of plug-ins is not appropriate, and where the target audience has access to the most recent
versions of major browsers.
■ Developers who have decided to work with WebGL should consider use of libraries and
frameworks (such as BabylonJS and three.js) because these can significantly ease the burden
of working with what some consider a cumbersome programming model.
■ Designers and developers should avoid use of gratuitous visual effects, including 3D effects,
just because browsers and hardware can now handle them. Unconsidered use of these effects
can make it harder rather than easier for users to accomplish their goals, and unmet user needs
can have a negative impact on ROI and business value.

Business Impact: There are certain scenarios and use cases where a picture is worth a thousand
words, but an interactive 3D model that can be manipulated in real-time is worth much more than
that (in terms of user-friendliness and business value when delivered by a website or web
application).
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Apple; Google; Microsoft; Mozilla
Sliding Into the Trough
Event-Driven Web
Analysis By: Ray Valdes; Mark Driver
Definition: Event-driven web refers to the use of frameworks and libraries that support a threadless,
nonblocking input/output (I/O), event-processing model for web applications, as opposed to thread-
based or process-based approaches to handling concurrent requests.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Event-driven programming is a technique among web
developers that has gained significant traction over the past six years due to gains in performance
and efficiency compared to traditional thread-based approaches.
There are now many choices for programming libraries and frameworks that support this
architecture and for different language platforms, including Python (Tornado, Twisted and gevent
libraries), Java (Vert.x), JavaScript (Node.js), C (libevent), Scala (Akka) and Ruby (EventMachine).
These tools are not all directly comparable. For example, Tornado is a framework, while Twisted is a
library. Both are written in Python, and they are often compared against each other, but they are
also complementary; Tornado can be implemented on top of Twisted, for example. HTTP servers
that employ the event-driven approach include Nginx. Languages with built-in support for event-
driven programming include Erlang (the gen_event default behavior).
In addition to server-side libraries, the use of browser-based event technology is increasing. The
WebSocket API is part of the HTML5 family of specifications, and vendors such as Kaazing and
Push Technology offer products that support browser-based eventing.
There are some high-profile sites that use event-driven tools. An early pioneer was FriendFeed, a
social web startup (acquired by Facebook) that developed the Tornado framework to handle high-
volume web requests in a scalable manner. Yammer, LinkedIn and eBay are all using Node.js for
some of their online systems.
The criticism voiced against event-driven programming is that code can become complex due to
use of callbacks that fragment the visible flow logic. Nevertheless, this approach appears to deliver

on the promise of high efficiency and high performance for a given level of server hardware
capacity.
Event-driven programming should not be confused with event-stream processing. The former is a
lightweight, narrow-scope, foundation-level technology for agile projects that emphasize time-to-
market and lean use of resources (both staff time and computational resources), suitable for
independent web projects and fast-moving ventures. The latter is about solving large-scale,
complex, data-centric problems with powerful systems (including rule engines, analytics, filtering
and dashboards). It allows enterprises that have ample resources (skilled staff and budget) to
achieve application-level capabilities and suitable strategic initiatives.
User Advice: Developers should:
■ Consider the event-driven programming pattern for scenarios of small to medium complexity,
coupled with requirements for high performance with modest resource consumption.
■ Understand the difference between low-level event handling and higher-level frameworks.
Business Impact: Event-driven libraries and frameworks have the potential to increase efficiency
(through the use of hardware resources), improve performance (and thereby improve the user
experience) and, in some cases, improve developer productivity (by allowing use of dynamic
languages such as Python, Ruby or JavaScript, which can be easier for writing code).
Sample Vendors: Facebook; Joyent; Kaazing; Node.js; Tornado
UX Tools
Definition: User experience (UX) tools are the software products used to automate or streamline the
steps through a UX process that, in turn, empowers UX teams. These products include, but are not
limited to, those for wireframing, prototyping, journey mapping and persona management.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: UX tools are not new. In fact, wireframing and
prototyping tools are well-established and deserve to be positioned at the Plateau of Productivity.
UX tools are also being built into development platforms or as part of a suite of products aimed at
powering websites and mobile apps. In addition, a number of tools in the market exist to help UX
practitioners with certain UX design activities, such as tools for design evaluation (Usabilla,
AttentionWizard), synthetic eye tracking (Inspectlet), user testing (Webnographer) and A/B testing
(Adobe, Maxymizer, Monetate, SiteSpect, Optimizely, VWO, Qubit).

While these tools mostly exist to aid UX activities, they do not facilitate the UX design process.
There is, however, definitive moves to create technological frameworks to facilitate better UX design
processes — not competing with the above-mentioned tools, but rather complementing them. This
is partly fueled by an emerging shift from UX as a service engagement to services surfacing as
products, and the need for larger in-house teams to coordinate UX efforts across projects. Products
like UX360 from TandemSeven and Cycle from KPMG are indicative of this trend. While UX360 is
being sold as a packaged application, Cycle is being provided to clients as a component of
integrated digital enablement.
The market is still nascent and the hype levels are low. We expect awareness and interest in these
types of products to pick up due to the growing interest in UX within enterprises, along with their
penchant to seek new tools and technology as an early step in any response to new trends. But
uptake will be slow due to the significant process and skills change requirements needed in
enterprises for these tools to be of lasting value.
User Advice: UX tools are only as good as the practitioners that use them and the UX processes for
which they are being used. Enterprises should not be seeking to acquire these products as the
basis to improve UX in their organizations. They should, instead, seek to revise their approach to
software development and skills as the basis for improving UX, then apply these products where
required. Design agencies committed to a professional-services-based strategy must recognize that
a growing part of the UX design process is beginning to be automated through software. They
should innovate business models and delivery methodologies to avoid the forces of
commoditization negatively impacting their business.
Business Impact: The most pronounced impact from the increasing scope of UX tooling will be on
the design ecosystem. This includes dedicated digital design agencies, high-end web developers,
and the digital/UX design teams found in advertising agencies and traditional IT system integrators.
Ongoing automation will drive greater efficiency that can drive higher margins. However, automation
also erodes competitive differentiation. UX tools will put increased pressure on design agency
management to stay competitive in an already hyperfragmented market.
Enterprises today will see less impact, as the scope of in-house UX design work is still nascent.
However, we believe this will change as more in-house UX design teams emerge. An
implementation by a significantly large enterprise could rapidly expand the market, as
subcontracted UX design houses will likely be obliged to work with the same tools.
Sample Vendors: Apple; Axure; Balsamiq; iRise; KPMG; Microsoft; TandemSeven
Recommended Reading: "Improving Website User Experience With Data-Driven Design"
"Improving Website User Experience With A/B and Multivariate Testing"

"The Impact of Mobile and Social on User Experience Design Metaphors"
"Take These Four Steps to Implement a Value-Driven, User-Centered Design Process"
"Best Practices for Driving Business Value Through Usability and User Experience"
"Rethink the Presentation Layer to Simplify the User Experience You Build"
Public Web APIs

Analysis By: Mark O'Neill
Definition: Public web APIs expose data, business processes and application capabilities for public
consumption, often to encourage people to participate in the API economy. Consumers of public
web APIs may include mobile apps, third-party websites and, more recently, chat bots and digital
assistants. An API developer portal is frequently used to enable sign-up and self-service by
developers. A number of business models for API monetization, both direct and indirect, are in use.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Web APIs are required to enable external developers
to build mobile and social applications, as well as to engage with ecosystems such as those that
have developed around smart objects and digital assistants. However, public web APIs have often
been built on the basis of an "if we build it, they will come" strategy, with disappointing results in
terms of uptake. Consequently, a number of high-profile organizations have abandoned their public
web APIs to concentrate instead on private APIs within their own ecosystem of partners. This
development, combined with a number of API security incidents, has led to a more considered
approach among the early mainstream adopters.
User Advice: CIOs, CTOs and API program directors should:
■ Treat public web APIs as products. Ensure they have a product manager, coherent versioning
and a clearly communicated roadmap.
■ Plan a business strategy for public web APIs in advance. Carefully consider which developers
and, by extension, which users will use them, as well as how they can be exploited through
web, digital business, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile and social strategies. Consider that the
intended API consumer could be a person (using an app, digital assistant or chat interface) or a
smart object (as part of the IoT). Consider packaging business algorithms as APIs available to
third-party developers (see "Algorithm Marketplaces Are Bringing the App Economy to
Analytics").
■ Do not take it for granted that a public web API will be used, once it is published. Establishing
traction requires the creation of developer awareness, targeting and cultivation of a community
of developers, and tapping into nearby communities, as well as making a richly documented
API easy to consume via a functional, self-service developer portal.
■ Ensure that an API security strategy is in place to protect your public web API. This can be a
combination of application delivery controller infrastructure, web application firewalls and
dedicated API gateways.

■ Use full life cycle API management to manage the API through the entire process of planning,
designing, runtime deployment and versioning, through to retirement.
Business Impact: Public web APIs give organizations an opportunity to create new revenue,
enhance the customer experience and embrace new ecosystems. By providing an alternative to
cruder client approaches such as "screen-scraping," public web APIs engage external developers in
a managed fashion, and ultimately enable the monetization of data and services. In addition, a well-
designed and promoted public web API serves as a counter to disrupters entering the market with
an API-led (or "API first") strategy. However, a clear upfront business model is required — otherwise,
a public web API risks falling into disuse. Note also that the negative business impact of an
unsecured public web API may be substantial, so API security is paramount.
Sample Vendors: 3scale; Apigee; Axway; CA Technologies; IBM; MuleSoft; TIBCO Software; WSO2
Recommended Reading: "The API Economy: Turning Your Business Into a Platform (or Your
Platform Into a Business)"
"Algorithm Marketplaces Are Bringing the App Economy to Analytics"
Context-Enriched Services
Definition: Context-enriched services combine demographic, psychographic, historical and

environmental data with other information to offer enriched, situation-aware, targeted, personalized
and relevant content, functions and experiences. The term denotes services and APIs that use
information about the user and the session to fine-tune the software's actions and to push content
to the user at the moment of need, or to suggest products and services that are most attractive to
the user at a specific time.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Context enrichment approaches are now widespread.
One of the hot areas of contextual computing is digital marketing, where first-party data containing
demographic and prior-buying behavior is combined with third-party data from web, mobile and
social analytics to deliver highly targeted advertising content and recommendations. Contextual
awareness has become a significant competitive differentiator for customer engagement.
Context-enriched services extend beyond the original context-aware technology (the horizontal
portal) into a multitude of web and mobile applications (including personalization engines, mobile
application development tools, web content management products, and digital marketing
technologies, among others).

"Context" has become a relatively common concept for both independent software vendors and
end-user IT departments. Most enterprises are delivering applications with a basic level of context
services, but some employ highly context-aware, advanced marketing techniques. This level of
adoption will continue to grow, especially as the addition of the Internet of Things (IoT) as a source
of contextual attributes will drive context-aware computing significantly over the next few years.
User Advice: Context is a critical success factor for all types of engagement strategies, especially
for customers, but also for partners and employees. IT leaders should look for opportunities to
leverage context-enriched services in all customer-, employee-, partner- and citizen-facing
solutions. Compelling user experiences are often driven by contextual experiences, and these user
experiences impact the overall customer experience.
IT leaders should work closely with their marketing departments on all customer-facing solutions, as
marketing is "home base" for key demographic, psychographic, audience segmentation and third-
party data. Additionally, the sales organization is critical in identifying key internal sales data.
As the IoT progresses, IT leaders should work with their digital business leaders to identify new
contextual attributes that can improve the customer experience.
Business Impact: Context-enriched services will be transformational for enterprises that are
looking to increase customer engagement and maximize revenue. In addition, context enrichment is
the next frontier for business applications, platforms and development tools. The ability to automate
the processing of context information will increase the agility, relevance and precision of IT services.
New vendors that are likely to emerge will specialize in gathering and injecting contextual
information into business applications. New kinds of business applications — especially those
driven by consumer opportunities — will emerge, because the function of full context awareness
may end up being revolutionary and disruptive to established practices.
Over the next few years, the IoT will generate many new contextual attributes that the enterprise
can use for personalization and targeting. These will raise the bar for contextual services, and add
another competitive differentiator.
Sample Vendors: Adobe; Apple; Facebook; Google; IBM; Microsoft; Oracle; SAP; Sense Networks
Recommended Reading: "Market Insight: What to Focus on When Creating Contextual Customer
Experiences"
"Context-Aware Computing Is the Next Big Opportunity for Mobile Marketing"
"Market Guide for Digital Personalization Engines"
"Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals"

Methodological UX Design
Analysis By: Brian Prentice; Magnus Revang
Definition: Methodological user experience (UX) design is an explicit, structured approach to

ensuring that UX is catered to in the creation of a technology solution. It includes both qualitative
methods such as observational studies and user research, and quantitative methods such as
analytics and data-driven design using A/B testing. Methodological UX design does not define each
of the individual activities; it is the connection of these different activities into an end-to-end
process.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: UX design has, for many years, been a bit of a
mystery. This type of work has been largely seen as a creative endeavor. While the output was often
impressive, the manner in which it was achieved was mysterious to those outside the process. Also,
although repeatable techniques have been emerging, they have been applied inconsistently.
With the different types of agencies and consultancies in the market, it has become increasingly
necessary for the true UX agencies that apply a comprehensive series of UX design steps in an end-
to-end fashion to be able to differentiate themselves from those that do not. As a result, these
agencies have made an explicit effort to replace the mystery with a clearly described
methodological approach to their work. This increased transparency around the processes
employed, together with increased communication in the design community, is resulting in a clear
set of best-practice UX design methodologies.
With methodological UX design, we see essentially the same pattern that emerged in the early
1990s as system integrators sought to position themselves as end-to-end solution design providers,
rather than a development "black box." Now, system integrators, management consulting and large
in-house enterprise application development departments are all acquiring agencies for their
methodological approach to UX design. As these acquisitions settle, we expect to see
methodological UX design becoming further connected into other practices (for example, change
management, risk management and corporate growth strategy planning).
User Advice: Enterprise IT organizations should learn how to assess UX/digital design agencies
based on their stated UX design methodology and their ability to execute against it. One of the most
important reasons for this assessment is that the digital workplace trend drives greater demand for
software experiences more commonly found in consumer markets. This, in turn, increases the
demand for UX design. At some point, the cost of third-party engagement on a project-by-project
basis will become too expensive for most organizations to bear, so the UX design (in whole or in
part) is being taken in-house. Methodological UX design is of significant benefit to enterprises
because it describes UX design in a stepwise fashion. Enterprises can then determine which parts
of the processes they want to, or can, implement and which parts they'll maintain as third-party
engagements. For example, an enterprise IT organization may seek to integrate external corporate
ethnographic services within an internal design team that processes that data into a design
specification to be built by a different third-party development provider. Methodological UX design
helps in defining not just the individual steps, but also the integration requirements between each
step.

Business Impact: Methodological UX design increases the likelihood of usable and contextually
relevant technology solutions. Today, this is seen as critical for customer-facing systems,
particularly those associated with digital marketing initiatives. It is the reason why a large
percentage of engagements with UX/digital design agencies are being initiated by marketing or
other customer-facing departments in the enterprise. However, digital workplace demands — such
as those associated with employee engagement initiatives — are also directing methodological UX
design inwards.
Sample Vendors: Deloitte Digital; KPMG; Method; projekt202; TandemSeven
Client-Side MVC
Analysis By: Ray Valdes; Magnus Revang
Definition: Client-side model-view-Controller (MVC) refers to a browser-side implementation of the

long-established MVC architectural design pattern. This is implemented with a combination of
client-side technologies (JavaScript, CSS, HTML) whose proportion varies depending on the
specific library, of which there are multiple dozens.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: MVC is an approach to architecting interactive

applications, one that partitions the system into three major subsystems:
■ Model: The data object, which is updated as a result of user input and whose contents are
stored into a back-end database and also rendered onto one or more views.
■ View: The means of presenting the contents of the data object to the user. There can be
multiple possible renderings of a data model, sometimes simultaneously (that is, a graphical
view, as well as a textual view, of a network diagram or, alternatively, a side view and a top view
of a 3D object).
■ Controller: The part of the system that receives and responds to user actions (keystrokes,
mouse clicks, mouse movements, gestures and so on). The controller can also respond to
system events (such as a push notification) and often updates the model as a response to
events, which is then propagated to the view.
The MVC pattern has been proven in complex graphical user interface (GUI) applications dating
back to the Smalltalk system in the late 1970s. After Smalltalk, there have been multiple
manifestations of MVC, including server-side Java and .NET web platforms (for example, Struts
framework in Java or ASP.NET MVC in .NET).
In recent years, the MVC architectural pattern is being rapidly adopted among client-side JavaScript
frameworks. As web and mobile web UIs become more and more sophisticated, architects and

developers are increasingly looking to the partitioning of MVC architectures for the client side of
their projects. There has been a flourish of activity and innovation in this space, including libraries
and frameworks like Backbone, Knockout, Ember, Angular, Meteor, Derby and dozens of others.
As with any emerging sector, not all packages are directly comparable or consistently named with
regard to architectural pattern. Some use alternative nomenclature to MVC, such as "model view
presenter" (MVP), "model-view-viewmodel" (MVVM) and "presentation-abstraction-control" (PAC). A
few observers use the "MV*" (MV star) nomenclature to refer to this family of MVC-related
frameworks and libraries. One could argue that these are all just more-prescriptive versions of MVC
(in that they all use a dispatcher to force synchronous, one-way flow to update the model).
Some frameworks, such as Meteor or Mojito, go beyond client-side MVC to include a homogeneous
server-side programming model as well.
Although adoption of MVC is robust, there are also signs of a backlash against its complexity when
dealing with web pages that have many interlinked components on a page, and when coordination
is required between client-side MVC and server-side MVC. Facebook React is a client-side
framework that takes a component-based approach instead of an MVC approach. The company's
position is that MVC is good for small applications, but for large applications with a proliferation of
models and views, the complexity becomes overwhelming. In contrast to MVC, React uses the Flux
architecture, which consists of actions, dispatchers, store and view. However, at a distance, one
could view the Flux architecture as simply a variant implementation of the MVC philosophy. Google
Polymer is another framework that emphasizes components (Polymer "elements") and pushes MVC
into the background.
Despite the backlash, the principles behind MVC are sound, and proven in a wide range of
scenarios and complex software systems, going back 40 years. MVC as an architectural pattern
and practice is unlikely
User Advice:
■ Understand not only the basics of the classical MVC approach, but also the refinements (such
as MVP, MVVM, Flux and Web Components) if you develop interactive graphical applications
and online systems. Even if you do not choose a framework, the MVC perspective will improve
the structure of your system.
■ Consider all MVC-derived frameworks (whether Backbone, Angular, Meteor, React, Polymer, or
dozens of others) to be highly tactical choices, due to a fragmented and dynamic market. It is
likely that the one you choose for your next project will be superseded by some other
framework — one that becomes "the jQuery of client-side MVC." It is possible that the
framework that eventually dominates has not yet appeared on the market.
Business Impact: The benefit of MVC partitioning is to facilitate design, construction and
maintenance of complex interactive applications. The MVC pattern limits coupling between
subsystems (that is, the model does not know which views are "observing" it, nor does it know
about controllers; it only knows about messages to update its contents), and this decoupling allows
different parts of the system to evolve.

An additional benefit of the MVC approach compared with traditional approaches is that it reduces
the amount of code required to implement an application (by an order of a two to three times
improvement in conciseness). The idea is that the less code developers have to write, the easier it is
to maintain and debug.
Sample Vendors: Angular; Backbone; Derby; Ember; Facebook; Google; Knockout; Meteor
Recommended Reading: "Choosing a JavaScript Framework"
A/B and Multivariate Testing

Analysis By: Magnus Revang; Ray Valdes
Definition: A/B and multivariate testing is a systematic, statistical and empiric process designed to
facilitate a continuous improvement of user experience. E-commerce and marketing sites use the
technique extensively to increase measurable outcomes, but the technique is also gaining
popularity in other settings, including media, financial services and travel.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Although the techniques of split A/B testing and
multivariate testing are well-known and well-established in high-end e-commerce sites, other
smaller websites are only now starting to adopt these techniques, which places this category of
technologies in the early mainstream stage. Within the enterprise, business users, primarily in the
marketing organization, have incorporated this practice into their repertoire. This is applied primarily
to customer-facing sites and only occasionally to internal-facing and other sites.
A/B testing works by showing two different variants of a web page or application to two different
sets of users. By comparing the desired user action between the two variants, one variant can be
declared more effective than the other. Statistical models are used by A/B testing tools to ensure
validity of the results.
Multivariate testing is an advanced version of A/B testing, where multiple changes to a page are
tested at the same time. The changes are combined into all possible aggregates and shown to
different sets of users — with each user seeing a different combination of changes. Statistical
models are able to determine the best combination of changes in a much more effective way than
using A/B testing for each change in isolation.
There are numerous A/B testing tools, both stand-alone and integrated with broader-scope
platforms, offering varying degrees of functionality.
User Advice:

■ Establish measurable success criteria for the website to be improved with A/B and multivariate
testing.
■ Follow a proper A/B testing process based on the scientific process of testing hypothesis (see
"Improving Website User Experience With A/B and Multivariate Testing").
■ Combine A/B and multivariate testing for different purposes by testing the hypothesis with A/B
and refining the change needed with multivariate testing.
Business Impact: Multivariate and A/B testing can increase revenue by improving the conversion
rate, improving user satisfaction and retention by enhancing user effectiveness and reducing the
cost of self-service scenarios by improving usability.
Sample Vendors: Adobe; Dynamic Yield; Maxymiser; Monetate; Optimizely; Qubit; SiteSpect;
Visual Website Optimizer
Recommended Reading: "Improving Website User Experience With Data-Driven Design"
"Improving Website User Experience With A/B and Multivariate Testing"
Lean Portals
Analysis By: Jim Murphy
Definition: Lean portals provide just-enough capability to serve the fundamental role of an
enterprise portal — a unified, personalized point of access and interaction with relevant information,
business processes and people. The demand for lean portals is a response to the expanding
functional breadth, and accompanying cost and complexity of many established enterprise portal
initiatives, products and vendors as they evolve into more comprehensive suites.
Lean denotes a portal practice and a product characteristic, rather than a product category.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Lean portal demand derives from the expanding
functionality and growing complexity of many established portal platforms. Organizations seeking
platforms to build and manage portals for employees, customers, partners and various other
constituencies have had fewer choices as the marketplace consolidated to only a few dominant
players. Players like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP have become increasingly complex as they
add functionality (such as content management, search, social software and analytics), continue to
support legacy technologies and integration methods, attempt to create more comprehensive suites
and solutions comprising additional legacy, and acquire products in spaces adjacent to the portal
market.

The prime vendor beneficiaries of the demand for lean portals, and the best exemplars of the lean
portal qualities in their products, include Liferay, Backbase and Drupal. Most of the offerings are
open-source, with commercial support. Lean portal demand has also allowed vendors from other
spaces, such as Salesforce, to come into play as portal platform providers. In fact, even the
traditional portal leaders are capable of providing platforms that accommodate lean portal demand.
SAP is notable in this sense for its SAP Hana Cloud Portal (see "SAP Hana Cloud Portal Is a Front
End for SAP Innovation"). Organizations should keep in mind that even the most functionally
comprehensive portal platforms can be deployed in a lean manner.
However, lean portals have met with some disillusionment. Larger and firmly established enterprise
vendors have often made their more complex and comprehensive offerings compelling, to the point
of being undeniable at many organizations. Organization pursuing leaner approaches are also less
likely to get the "out of the box" capability that they increasingly desire to more readily meet
business requirements.
Portal-less portals and lean portals are complementary constructs. Both derive from customer
demand for simplicity amid the complexity of more-traditional portals and their providers. However,
the concepts are orthogonal:
■ Portal-less portals represent nontraditional, technical approaches that reduce the burden and
responsibility of a portal server in delivering a personalized point of access and interaction to
users. Portal-less portals rely more heavily on client-side capabilities than traditional portals.
■ Lean portals represent a resistance to the expanding functionality of portal suites and their
digital experience platform (DXP — formerly, user experience platform) derivatives. That is,
whereas DXPs have begun to encompass comprehensive content management, search,
collaboration, social, web analytics and mobile, among other capabilities, lean portals provide
just-enough functionality to perform the essential portal role. Lean portals can rely on either
server-side or client-side technical methods.
Thus, portal-less portals have lean qualities, but not all lean portals are portal-less.
User Advice: Organizations looking for basic portal functionality for specific projects should
consider offerings from Liferay, Backbase and Drupal.
Many of the products described as lean assume expertise in portal architecture and development.
Ensure you are adequately equipped to handle custom development when pursuing a lean portal
approach.
Just because you're using a rich and comprehensive portal or UXP, doesn't mean you can't "run
lean." Organizations using portal technology from larger providers may benefit from lean portal
practices, employing modern lightweight, client-centric standards to ensure interoperability, low
implementation costs and improved agility.
Business Impact: Many businesses, public-sector organizations and educational institutions have
built successful portal deployments using lean approaches, and they report considerably lower
costs and faster time to implement than traditional portals.

Organizations with mature and comprehensive service-oriented architectures (SOA) and web-
oriented architectures (WOA) are best equipped to avail themselves of the simple and lightweight
nature of lean portals. With much of the burden of integration, identity and access management,
and business process management handled in these architectures, traditional portals are often
overly complex and costly.
Sample Vendors: Backbase; DotNetNuke (DNN); Drupal; Liferay
Recommended Reading: "The Great Portal Divide: How a Rift in the Portal Market Will Impact Your
Web Strategy"
"Four Key Aspects of the Portal's Death (and Rebirth)"
Responsive Design
Analysis By: Ray Valdes; Magnus Revang
Definition: Responsive design (formerly responsive web design) is a client-side technique for
supporting multiple layouts in a single web channel. Responsive design (RD) uses declarative rules
in Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS3), which are applied to HTML on the client side and
supplemented with JavaScript. RD is now popular among developers, designers, toolmakers and
web platform vendors, and is currently used primarily for content-centric websites rather than
transactional sites — especially for sites that have a small number of different page types.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: RD first appeared in 2010, although it builds on the
broader concept of adaptive design that dates back more than a dozen years. In the original, strict
sense of the term, RD uses the CSS3 media query function to render different designs for different
form factors. The responsive design term is now sometimes used loosely to mean any website or
application that adapts itself to the device form factor in which it appears, regardless of how the
adaptation is accomplished. Gartner will continue to use responsive design in the original, specific
sense of the term and use the term "adaptive design" to refer to the broader set of techniques
(which can be client-side, server-side or a combination of the two).
RD is attractive because a single website can support access from smartphones, tablets and
desktop machines. The performance limitations of a strictly client-side mechanism are now well-
known, which have disappointed some early adopters, but, in general, the benefits of RD outweigh
the limitations, especially for content-centric sites. Initially, most implementations of RD were either
hand-coded or one of many small, open-source libraries or frameworks. However, this has changed,
as support for RD has become pervasive across the industry. Open-source content management
systems, such as WordPress and Drupal, that have large ecosystems (including marketplaces for
skins and themes) were the earliest systems to incorporate RD and this is now well-established. For
example, in online marketplaces for WordPress themes, the majority of themes are now responsive.

Major enterprise vendors (such as IBM, Microsoft and Adobe) have modified their tools and
platforms to support RD. Many mobile application development platform (MADP) vendors either
conform to responsive-design concepts or have released adaptive products in order to address the
dynamic pace of mobile change. There are multiple techniques to mitigate the performance
disadvantages of the client-side mechanism, but no single approach is dominant.
User Advice:
■ Consider responsive design as the default starting point for a decision on how to implement
content-centric mobile websites across a family of form factors.
■ Mitigate the limitations of RD, including performance limitations, by combining RD with server-
side adaptive web techniques.
■ Before hand-coding RD into a website, survey the landscape of web publishing tools, content
management systems and portal packages, because these increasingly provide support for RD.
■ Sites with complex requirements beyond content consumption (for example, transactional sites
with many screens and complex forms) should examine the alignment between their needs and
the current capabilities of RD tools and platforms.
■ Although responsive design can provide the lowest-common-denominator user experience (UX)
across a broad range of browsers/devices, organizations should not dismiss the potential of
mobile-centric, targeted apps that deliver high performance and leverage unique capabilities of
the device (for example, offline mode, camera and location sensing).
■ A long-term vision for design should include a full range of adaptive and contextual processing
in order to deliver the optimal UX.
Business Impact: What drives rapid adoption of RD is the increasing cost and complexity of
supporting a variety of devices with multiple form factors. Organizations need to project their web
presence across these channels and are struggling with redundancies, overlaps and cost-
inefficiencies.
RD addresses this increased need for a unified web presence. The performance limitations of the
client-side approach are not always perceived in the initial enthusiasm. A key limitation of RD is that,
in the naïve implementation, images are transferred full-size from servers to mobile devices. The
images are then scaled on the client-side devices after data transfer (meaning that bandwidth is
assumed to be unconstrained). A better approach, in most cases, is to do some amount of server-
side detection and conditional processing, sending already-scaled images from servers to clients.
Although RD is not a panacea, it can — and has — delivered significant value in many content-
centric scenarios — mostly for the low- to midrange requirements. As tools mature, expect to
leverage a broader range of sites and applications to deliver an RD experience.

Sample Vendors: Adobe; Automattic (WordPress); Filament Group; Gridless; Moovweb; retina.js;
Responsify; Twitter; Usablenet; Zurb
Recommended Reading: "Despite Its Limitations, Responsive Web Design Enables Many
Organizations to Move to a Unified Web Channel"
Semantic Web
Definition: Semantic Web is a means for adding semantic information to unstructured information
to make it machine-understandable and, using web technologies, for linking the unstructured
information to formalized concept definitions.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The original vision for the Semantic Web as a
universal language for information exchange has never emerged. The idea of the Semantic Web still
lives on, but the standards developed for the Semantic Web see only limited practical applicability in
healthcare, finance and other vertical industries.
A major advance in the vision of the Semantic Web has been the explosion of social networking and
social tagging. The "social graph" generated by semantic tagging forms a "giant global graph" that
was first described by Tim Berners-Lee. However, social graphs are in closed and controlled
platforms that fall short of the vision of an open, interoperable Semantic Web.
In addition, outside of the standard bodies, the schema.org initiative by Google, Microsoft and
Yahoo to define a set of standard rich semantics in order to improve search engine indexing is
gaining traction in customer-facing scenarios. This is partly initiated by search engine optimization
initiatives and fueled by the business value created from improved and richer search rankings on
Google, Bing and Yahoo searches. At the same time, this adoption is enabling the arrival of some of
the envisioned usage scenarios from Semantic Web, like aggregation services that are able to easily
index structured content from multiple sites by directly crawling the websites.
The real Semantic Web, and not the idealized original vision, is one of technology fragmentation,
where data is given contextual value, but is not portable across domains. Adoption is primarily in
specialized applications and in customer-facing scenarios with clear business value like visibility on
search engines or sharing on social networks.
User Advice: Look for semantic standards that are specific to your industry, and evaluate the value
of adopting them for big data analysis, message interoperability and improved search capabilities.
Although this will further exacerbate fragmentation, the value is in specific domain applications
because the value of Semantic Web technologies never materialized in its idealized form.
For consumer-facing scenarios, there can be great business value in applying semantic
vocabularies that are understood by social networks and search engines. Evaluate your existing
tools and implementations for their ability to create, maintain and deliver richer semantics.
For large bodies of content, machine learning platforms hold great promise in being able to
automatically add semantic information to existing unstructured content. Already happening in the

media industry, we expect to see the practice gain traction in other industries as well. Evaluate
platforms like IBM Watson/AlchemyAPI or Ontotext to do the tagging automatically as an alternative
to instituting rigorous governance processes.
This application of machine learning to the Semantic Web has the potential to pull it through the
current Trough of Disillusionment.
Business Impact: Delivering information across the web, with machine-readable and interpretable
semantics, can enhance application and site interoperability. It helps automate information
discovery. It produces contextually relevant searches and search options that are difficult or
impossible without rich semantic information. In addition to tagging data elements with basic
vocabularies (for example, tagging items to identify personal and organizational information), linked
data ontologies enable creation of sophisticated concepts that enable systems to infer relationships
across datasets that were not defined explicitly. This improves the quality of content management,
information access, system interoperability and database integration. Newer initiatives like social
graphs and search engine vocabularies can have significant impact on sharing and visibility on
search engines, thus creating marketing value.
Sample Vendors: Facebook; Google; IBM; Ontotext; Yahoo
Recommended Reading: "Hype Cycle for Big Data, 2014"
"The Nexus of Forces Is Driving the Adoption of Semantic Technologies, but What Does That
Mean?"
"Information Management in the 21st Century Is About All Kinds of Semantics"
Portal PaaS
Definition: A portal platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud-based, multitenant offering that

enterprises can use to build, deliver and maintain cloud-based portals. Portals are personalized,
unified points of access to relevant information, business processes and people. They use a page
framework and a visual component construct to aggregate and deliver content, applications and
composites and include cohesive services for managing security, personalization, content and
integration.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Organizations have only lately seen enough benefit in
portal PaaS to outweigh lingering concerns. However, the space is on the verge of an upswing, as
organizations begin actively seeking and adopting portal PaaS.

Key drivers include the following:
■ Enterprises seek portal platforms that can provide unified access across SaaS applications and
other cloud-based services. In the past, customers resisted adopting a PaaS because most of
the resources they were attempting to unify were rooted on-premises. Some are now resistant
to traditional on-premises portal platforms, in part because so many of their assets, as well as
their future plans, are in the cloud.
■ Influential vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce are introducing
compelling portal PaaS offerings. Visionary portal providers have moved beyond feature parity;
several offer innovation features and qualities in their portal PaaS offerings that demonstrate the
unique qualities and attributes of the cloud-based portal proposition.
■ Organizations increasingly garner business value from faster time to market, reduced
complexity and improved total cost of ownership (TCO) for the portal PaaS versus purely on-
premises offerings. Ready support for mobility and bandwidth-intensive content, such as video,
is also driving organizations toward portal PaaS.
■ Portal SaaS, especially in the form of cloud-based "intranets in a box," is increasingly popular
among enterprise customers and requires a portal PaaS basis.
The increase in demand is accompanying growing confidence in cloud-based platforms for

collaboration and a wide range of business applications in adjacent areas, especially human capital
management (HCM), CRM and digital marketing, which constitute core ecosystems for business-to-
employee (B2E) portals and business-to-customer (B2C) portals.
However, cloud aversion still exists among portal customers, especially in highly regulated
industries. Moreover, while new features and integrations are increasingly available in a "cloud first"
manner, some of the more established portal capabilities, especially regarding custom development
and integration, remains problematic. Many customers are thus pursuing hybrid on-premises/cloud
portal strategies in an attempt to span deployment models and balance benefits and risks.
However, hybrid portal models are largely immature and don't yet offer a cohesive experience.
User Advice: Organizations should consider the cloud an integral part of their future portal
initiatives, especially as they expand to user experience platforms and employ SaaS line-of-
business applications, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and a wide range of content and context
services that can enhance their portals' utility, appeal and overall effectiveness.
Most organizations should prepare for a hybrid cloud/on-premises portal strategy, keeping in mind
that it may be some time before offerings and best practices for hybrid models mature. Hybrid
portals may run in the cloud while incorporating on-premises content and services or they may run
on-premises while incorporating cloud content and services. Although there is variability as to which
aspects of portals remain on-premises and which reside in the cloud, companies must ensure that
their portal technologies are equipped to accommodate a range of hybrid models. Hybrid cloud/on-
premises portals are difficult to achieve elegantly, given the complexity of portal technology and the
skills required. However, organizations may be increasingly compelled toward hybrid cloud/on-
premises models as their established vendors edge toward the cloud.

Organizations should be wary of custom development and integration in portal PaaS offerings.
Ensure that any customizations can be insulated from changes to underlying PaaS offerings. Ensure
that offerings support modern web technologies, such as HTML5/Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS3)
and RESTful means of interoperability. Otherwise, organizations should use out-of-the-box
capabilities, including prepackaged portlets and widgets, when possible.
Explore portal PaaS first for externally facing portals, especially extranets. There's an advantage to
the users and the portal both being outside the firewall.
Business Impact: CIOs and their IT organizations stand to benefit greatly from portal PaaS as a
means to respond quickly and efficiently to business needs. Portal PaaS often offers faster time to
market at a cost that's more in line with business value than traditional, on-premises portal
offerings. Portal PaaS approaches introduce the need for new and adapted skills and
responsibilities. Business leaders will be increasingly responsible for managing content and online
relationships with employees, customers, partners and citizens. IT organizations must focus on
ensuring security, data integrity and interoperability, while instituting governance that allows them to
safely delegate responsibility to the business.
Sample Vendors: IBM; Microsoft; Oracle; Salesforce; SAP
Recommended Reading: "Redefine Microsoft's Role in Your Web Strategy as SharePoint Moves to
the Cloud"
"SAP Hana Cloud Portal Is a Front End for SAP Innovation"
"Five Ways the Cloud Is Rolling Into the Enterprise Portal Market"
"The Rise of Portal Platform as a Service: The Vendor View"
"The Rise of Portal Platform as a Service: The Customer View"
"Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2016"
Cloud Computing
Definition: Cloud computing is a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled
capabilities are delivered as a service using internet technologies.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Cloud computing remains a very visible and hyped
term and has just past the Trough of Disillusionment. Yet cloud computing remains a major force in

IT. Every IT vendor has a cloud strategy — although many aren't cloud-centric, and some of their
cloud strategies are better described as "cloud inspired." Although users are unlikely to completely
abandon on-premises models, there is continued movement toward consuming more services from
the cloud and enabling capabilities not easily done elsewhere. Much of the focus is on agility, speed
and other non-cost-related benefits.
"Cloud computing" continues to be one of the most hyped terms in the history of IT. Its hype
transcends the IT industry and has entered popular culture, which has had the effect of increasing
hype and confusion around the term. In fact, cloud computing hype is literally "off the charts," as
Gartner's Hype Cycle does not measure amplitude of hype (that is, a heavily hyped term such as
"cloud computing" rises no higher on the Hype Cycle than anything else).
Although the peak of hype has long since passed, cloud still has more hype than many other
technologies that are actually at or near the Peak of Inflated Expectations. Variations, such as
private cloud computing and hybrid approaches, compound the hype, and reinforce that one dot on
a Hype Cycle cannot adequately represent all that is cloud computing. Some cloud variations (such
as hybrid IT) are now at the center of where the cloud hype currently is.
The hype around cloud computing continues to evolve and expand as the market matures. Initial
hype about cost savings now focuses more on the business benefits that organizations would
realize due to a shift to cloud computing. While some organizations have realized cost savings,
more are focusing on other benefits, such as agility, speed, time to market and innovation.
User Advice: User organizations must demand clarity from their vendors around cloud. Gartner's
definitions and descriptions of the attributes of cloud services can help with this. Users should look
at specific usage scenarios and workloads, map their view of the cloud to that of potential
providers, and focus more on specifics than on general cloud ideas. Understanding the service
models involved is key.
Vendor organizations should focus their cloud strategies on more specific scenarios and unify them
into high-level messages that encompass the breadth of their offerings. Differentiation in hybrid
cloud strategies must be articulated. This will be challenging, as all are "talking the talk," but many
are taking advantage of the even broader leeway afforded by the term. "Cloudwashing" should be
minimized.
Adopting cloud for the wrong reasons can lead to disastrous results. There are many myths
surrounding cloud computing as a result of the hype. See "The Top 10 Cloud Myths" for details and
advice.
Business Impact: The cloud computing model is changing the way the IT industry looks at user
and vendor relationships. Vendors must become providers, or partner with service providers, to
deliver technologies indirectly to users. User organizations will watch portfolios of owned
technologies decline as service portfolios grow. The key activity will be to determine which cloud
services will be viable, and when and how to take advantage of the capabilities.
Potential benefits of cloud include cost savings and capabilities (including concepts that go by
names like "agility," "time to market" and "innovation"). Organizations should formulate cloud

strategies that align business needs with those potential benefits. Agility is the driving factor, most
of the time.
Sample Vendors: Amazon; Google; IBM; Microsoft; Oracle; Salesforce; SAP; VMware
Recommended Reading: "Cloud Computing Primer for 2016"
"The Top 10 Cloud Myths"
Climbing the Slope
Mobile Web Apps

Definition: Mobile web apps are apps that run on a standard web server in conjunction with a
mobile web browser. They typically use HTML (and, increasingly, HTML5 components). Rich, mobile
web applications can have usability comparable to that of native mobile apps when designed
specifically for mobile form factors, although native apps will mostly deliver richer experiences.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Enterprise interest in mobile web apps remains
strong, despite their limitations, which include the following:
■ They require a good network connection.

■ They can't access all the capabilities of popular mobile devices (although they can access a
subset).
■ They sometimes have user interface (UI) performance issues (this has improved, but still can be
an issue).
■ Some capabilities, such as offline, have complexities that have not yet been overcome.
The standards for HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are evolving to better
support mobile devices, and mobile browsers are becoming more powerful. The mobile web is
particularly well-suited to information-rich sites and in certain scenarios, such as news reporting.
Capabilities such as deep linking and discoverability due to search engine optimization also give
web-based approaches an edge. Pure mobile web approaches are not keeping up with the
capabilities available in native environments. Hybrid approaches continue to be more popular,
especially for enterprise use. Best practices for mobile web apps utilize responsive design and are
increasingly becoming more progressive in nature.

User Advice: Invest in mobile web technology and skills. Investments in mobile web technology
and skills can be used to build mobile websites and hybrid apps, not just for mobile web apps.
Approaches such as responsive design can be useful when building for multiple form factors.
Consider mobile web apps when wide reach and low cost are key requirements. There are many
issues to consider when choosing between a web, hybrid or native app. Mobile web apps can
satisfy the requirements of many mobile scenarios, and they can require less investment to build
and maintain, depending on various factors.
Consider other approaches when a mobile web app won't meet your business requirements, or
when certain capabilities, such as offline usage scenarios, are important.
Business Impact: Mobile web apps can improve engagement with and the productivity of
customers, partners and employees. Mobile presence has become a critical requirement for
reaching consumers and, increasingly, business users. Mobile websites are often used as vehicles
for promoting the downloading of native/hybrid apps, and Google has recently changed its search
algorithms to favor mobile-friendly sites. Online strategies must increasingly take into account
users' expectations for a rich, native mobile app experience, as well as the need to reach more
platforms. Mobile web technology approaches can play a role in both, but often using hybrid
methods.
Sample Vendors: Adobe; Google; Microsoft; Moovweb; PowWow Mobile; Salesforce
Recommended Reading: "Increase Mobile Team Effectiveness by Understanding Web, Native and
Hybrid Trade-Offs"
"Taxonomy, Definitions and Vendor Landscape for Mobile AD Technologies"
"Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms"

Definition: Website experience analytics is a subset of advanced web analytics techniques. It

analyzes how effective a website is in providing a net-positive user experience, which could drive
successful business outcomes. Although the techniques of website experience analytics have been
pioneered on websites, increasingly the same capabilities are made available for mobile apps as
well.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Website experience analytics combines the
quantitative analytics of user behavior and product performance with qualitative metrics of

consumers, such as demographics, to better understand the user's experience with the website,
and to identify specific points for improvement. The tools were historically used by online channels
and by e-commerce merchants, and they have expanded quickly over the last couple of years into
vertical industries, such as telecommunications, financial services and airline companies.
Some measurements, such as clickstream, page load times, funnel analysis, customer surveys and
sentiment indexes, are becoming more mature and standardized. Other measurements, such as text
and contextual mining and multivariate testing, are still not widely adopted, but are becoming more
capable.
Capabilities that have previously been constrained into three different markets — web analytics,
application performance monitoring, and testing suites — are beginning to converge. Since these
tools traditionally have been used by different parts of the organization, the likelihood of
successfully converged tool suites is still uncertain.
Traditional web analytics suite vendors are expanding their capabilities to capture a broader view of
the customer experience journey by identifying users across multiple devices and merging analytics
with CRM data, offline data capture and business intelligence offerings. Application performance
monitoring vendors are adding advanced user behavior monitoring into their offerings, making user
experience metrics part of the overall performance monitoring of not only websites, but also web
apps, hybrid mobile apps, and even native apps and applications. At the same time, testing suite
vendors are adding capabilities to perform real-time monitoring.
User Advice: Enterprises should consider updating to more advanced analytics tools, with more
advanced capabilities and the ability to integrate with other sources of user data. These tools can
help improve the customer experience on the enterprise website. They can also adjust site elements
— such as rich-media applications, navigation and flow paths, and shopping aids — to drive
successful business outcomes.
Enterprises should also consider running multiple tools for quantitative analytics, one for measuring
the overall customer journey and one for performance monitoring of the individual touchpoint.
Enterprises should invest as much in skills and the organization as the tools themselves. The
adoption challenge for website experience analytics is organizational rather than technological. The
gap between the skills of the end-user organization and the capabilities of the tools is widening. The
result is that enterprises that are fully invested in website experience analytics, and that have the
appropriate skills and processes to take advantage of it, are gaining competitive advantage over
enterprises that are struggling with adoption. Vendors almost exclusively offer website experience
analytics as a SaaS, with the consequence that innovations and capability advances are in the
hands of customers almost instantly — further aggravating the divide between adoption in best-in-
class and average enterprises. The focus, attention and investments made in big data capabilities
might help adoption as enterprises are changing to a more data-driven culture.
Business Impact: Investing in website experience analytics is becoming more indispensable to

enterprises with online channels as websites become more strategic to them, as well as to service-
delivery-oriented enterprises. The core process is to collect, analyze and monitor customers'

behavioral activities on websites; providing a view into what is and isn't working helps optimize
digital channels.
The impact of search engine advertising, email campaigns, cross-sell or upsell targeting, and social
media activity can be measured and refined through website experience analytics. Customer data
can be gathered and incorporated into personalized and context-rich content for marketing
campaign decisions (such as profitability analysis and segmentation) and leveraged for every
interaction channel in a campaign management strategy. Subscriber behavior can be analyzed to
identify satisfaction issues and potential churn candidates.
Sample Vendors: Adobe; AppDynamics; Dynatrace; Google; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; IBM
(Tealeaf); New Relic; Soasta; Webtrends
Recommended Reading: "Market Guide for Web Analytics"
"Improving Website User Experience With Data-Driven Design"
"Top 10 Mistakes in Web and User Experience Design Projects"
Cloud/Web Platforms
Definition: Cloud/web platforms use web technologies to provide programmatic access (that is,
APIs) to functionality on the web, including storage and computing power. Gartner uses the terms
"web platform" and "cloud platform" interchangeably, as well as the merged term "cloud/web
platforms." These platforms have ecosystems similar to traditional platforms, but the concept
originally emerged as a result of market and technology changes collectively known at the time as
"Web 2.0." Cloud/web platforms are all about APIs.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The use of cloud/web platforms is happening first in
consumer markets. As further adoption of all the cloud service layers increases, use and maturity
will evolve. Enterprise use of cloud service capabilities is also underway, as is use at higher levels.
Furthermore, public APIs are gaining traction and are part of the overall phenomenon now known as
"the API economy." Cloud/web platforms are rising beyond the Trough of Disillusionment as APIs
themselves become more mainstream.
The cloud/web platform is not the same as platform as a service (PaaS). According to the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), PaaS refers to the middleware layer in cloud
architectures. The cloud/web platform is broader, and it employs a more accurate use of the term
"platform" as a relative term (see "NIST and Gartner Cloud Approaches Are More Similar Than
Different"); in addition, the platform is applicable at all layers of cloud architecture. Gartner's use of

the term "cloud/web platform" predates the PaaS term and current cloud terminology but is
consistent with it.
Cloud/web platforms will serve as broad, general-purpose platforms; however, more specifically,
they support business flexibility and speed requirements by exploiting new and enhanced forms of
application development and delivery. Web platforms reuse many capabilities and technologies that
have been already accessible on websites through browsers by adding programmatic access to the
underlying global-class capabilities. Reuse is occurring via services/APIs and is being delivered
through web-oriented architecture (WOA) interfaces, increasingly JavaScript Object Notation
(JSON). These platforms provide programmatic access to cloud computing capabilities. The public
API phenomenon has taken WOA beyond consumer markets and into enterprise scenarios.
User Advice: Embrace the API economy, and evolve your enterprise environment toward cloud/web
platforms. Use PaaS technologies as appropriate, but embrace technologies at all layers of the
application stack, and treat the collection of services and APIs as a platform.
Business Impact: Web platforms can be leveraged as part of business solutions, and they will form
much of the basis for efforts by enterprises to take advantage of digital business. Web platforms
can decrease barriers to entry, as well as deliver substantial value for small or midsize businesses
that cannot afford to, or choose not to, build and maintain capabilities and infrastructures (examples
include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure). Note that the term
"cloud/web platform" is broader than, and includes multiple layers in, cloud computing terminology
(for example, infrastructure as a service [IaaS], PaaS and software as a service [SaaS]), and the use
of the term "platform" is different from the term "PaaS."
Incorporate cloud/web platform concepts (via APIs and cloud services) as part of your enterprise
architecture.
Sample Vendors: Amazon; Google; Microsoft; Salesforce
Recommended Reading: "Web Platforms Are Coming to an Enterprise Near You"
"NIST and Gartner Cloud Approaches Are More Similar Than Different"
HTML5
Definition: "HTML5" is a term that has multiple meanings, which has increased the related hype. It
is the name of an actual standard run by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that was
"finalized" as of YE14. It is also a synonym of sorts for a broader meaning of "the modern web" — a

collection of web technologies commonly used to build web applications. HTML5 brings to the web
many of the rich internet application (RIA)-like capabilities that previously required additional
software (for example, plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight).
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: In addition to its formal standard status, HTML5 has
referred to a collection of more than 100 specifications under five standards organizations — if one
includes related modern web technologies, such as Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS3) and
JavaScript. HTML5, the standard, was ratified by the W3C in 2014. However, only those
components of the loose collection of features previously lumped together under the name
"HTML5" that have been finalized have been incorporated. The W3C basically drew a line around
what was done (Canvas, WebSocket, video and so forth). Before its finalization, it included other
efforts (such as WebRTC, offline and payments) that are now separate efforts. Plans are underway
for a next version (5.1), as well.
HTML5 (and modern web) usage and stability are being driven by both desktop and mobile use
scenarios, with different driving factors for each environment. There are different use cases for
HTML5 in mobile. On mobile, there is the pure web approach, including web apps that are accessed
by a mobile browser. There is much wider adoption of hybrid architectures, where HTML and other
web technologies are used in conjunction with native-code wrappers. This contributes to the
continued confusion around HTML5 discussions even today, after the specification and definition
have been finalized.
In desktop use cases, web technologies are the primary way new functionality is delivered. More
modern capabilities (such as those specified in HTML5) are gradually gaining usage, which is
contributing to the increased popularity and usage of modern browsers, such as Chrome.
User Advice: For developers:
■ Become familiar with the constituent subsystems of HTML5 and other modern web
technologies and their relative maturity, and align these to the requirements of your web
projects.
■ Implement your application or website using proven practices, such as feature detection
(instead of browser detection) and progressive enhancement.
■ Adjust your strategies for HTML5 to take into account its multiple use cases, including mobile
hybrid architecture.
Business Impact: While usage of HTML5 as part of the web continues to increase, some of that
use is not in pure web scenarios (such as in mobile hybrid). Therefore, business strategies need to
account for app store monetization and distribution strategy issues. As with many technologies,
especially on the web, interest is occurring primarily outside the enterprise sector — such as among
progressive web designers and mobile application developers. Many web developers and designers
are becoming familiar with the core features of HTML5 that have been finalized, such as Canvas and
video. Developers of sites that rely on Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight need to pursue a
migration and exit strategy that will be implemented as their sites get refreshed or rewritten. Mobile
developers are increasingly adopting HTML5 as part of multiple cross-platform strategies, including
pure web and hybrid approaches, especially for internal-facing projects.

The business impact is the benefits of portability. Although 100% portability is not attainable, there
are benefits to increased portability, which HTML5 helps provide.
Sample Vendors: Adobe; Apple; Google; IBM; Kaazing; Microsoft; Sencha
Recommended Reading: "HTML5 and the Journey to the Modern Web"
"Flash, Silverlight and the RIA Dilemma in a World of HTML5"
"Browser Vendors' HTML5 Strategies Are Not the Same"
"HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash"

Analysis By: Van L. Baker
Definition: Hybrid mobile development allows developers to use web skills and technologies
(HTML, CSS, JavaScript), running in a container, such as Apache Cordova, to build mobile apps
that can be delivered via an app store to a mobile device and used like native apps. Hybrid
development allows HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 code reuse across multiple mobile OSs, enabling
access to hardware capabilities via the native container. Hybrid development allows integration of
native code, and can yield apps with a native app look and feel.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Hybrid mobile development provides a productive
and cost-efficient way to build mobile apps for a wide variety of mobile devices and OS versions in
use by customers, partners and employees. Given the potential cost and complexity of native
mobile app development, many enterprises prefer to use hybrid development where possible,
allowing the reuse of existing skills and technologies and web assets in addition to mobile-app-
specific assets.
While 90% of enterprises still develop apps using native tools, they are increasingly viewing hybrid
and native not so much a binary choice, but as a spectrum. Hybrid containers allow access to
snippets of native code, while HTML5 fragments make sense for certain areas of mainly native
apps. This allows developers to pick the most effective development approach for areas within the
app, based on criteria such as performance, security and productivity.
User Advice: Mobile apps and mobile websites address different audiences, with mobile apps
selected by customers and users that desire a deeper level of engagement. Hybrid mobile
development can leverage web assets while delivering that deeper engagement that mobile apps
promise. Consider building a mobile app with hybrid development when cost-efficiency and broad
device support are high priorities. Native development is favored in the most demanding apps,

where UI reactivity, graphics performance and processing speed are of paramount importance.
Keep in mind that for more demanding apps, hybrid development might still be an option, but the
cost benefits of building with hybrid app development will diminish as more native code is used in
the container. Also keep in mind that the quality of the apps is dependent on the engineering and
design talent that you have.
For large portfolios of mobile apps, consider using a mobile application development platform
(MADP) that supports mobile web, hybrid and native development, but don't expect a single MADP
to be the best choice for all your mobile websites and apps. Many rapid mobile app development
(RMAD) tools also create hybrid apps as their delivery vehicle for cross-platform support and can be
used by business analysts and citizen developers to create apps needed in a very short time frame.
Business Impact: Mobile apps built using hybrid techniques can help enterprises deliver cross-
platform apps more rapidly and represent an ideal way to address the significant backlog of
employee-facing apps. Increasing enterprise mobility, in turn, increases employee engagement and
productivity.
Sample Vendors: Adobe; Angular; Apache Cordova; Mendix; Meteor; OutSystems; Progress
Software; SAP
Recommended Reading: "Blueprint for Architecting Modern Web Applications With HTML5, CSS
and JavaScript"
"Build Great Mobile Apps With HTML5"
"Modernize Application Development to Succeed as a Digital Business"
Content Migration
Analysis By: Gavin Tay
Definition: Content migration refers to the process of consolidating and transferring content, its
related metadata, permissions, compound structure and linked components, stored permanently in
one or more enterprise content management (ECM) repositories, to a new environment. During the
migration process, enterprises typically choose to cleanse content management repositories by
archiving old and outdated content.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The demand for and complexity of content migration
have increased sharply as organizations re-evaluate their existing ECM investments due to market
consolidation and digital workplace initiatives. Such complexities are twofold:

■ Old ECM deployments increasingly employ hybrid content architectures featuring a linked
repository of records across a myriad of content repositories.
■ New deployments in enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS) move content to the
cloud or back to a regulated, on-premises environment.
Content migration to ECM alternatives leverages connectors for the one-time, one-way transfer of
large volumes of content stored in obsolete repositories, or progressively from Microsoft SharePoint
Server to cloud alternatives going forward. Migration tools, though sometimes very robust, are
occasional and typically one-way bulk loaders, although they are increasingly becoming more
granular in approach.
User Advice: Enterprises should pick content management vendors that offer standardized and
easily accessible repositories. At present, migration tools that support the movement of large
volumes of content from end-of-life repositories to newer technologies, such as EFSS or purpose-
built content migrators that transform content during the migration, are one of the biggest stories in
the market. Such tools add immediate value.
Evaluate opportunities to employ in-house IT expertise with the acquisition of migration tools, or to
hire a system integrator that would use its own migration frameworks and experts. Using in-house
staff may absorb the cost involved, but external expertise should ease the rigorous efforts required
to perform complex migrations. It is essential to realize that investment in a migration tool is short-
lived until the migration has been completed. Such expenditure would be better allocated to
improving evolving content governance or an organizational taxonomy driven by business
outcomes.
Although each migration is dependent upon business needs, many organizations have been highly
successful by simply archiving old environments and moving onto a new "greenfield" environment
without bringing across any baggage. Not only does this approach eliminate the migration cost
burden or the need for migration tools, it also separates most of the dependencies between the old
and new systems, allowing for more autonomy when introducing the new solution into the business
environment.
Business Impact: Content migration technology can accelerate a migration process overall,
facilitate content availability, and provide a single view of a single source of truth for customer,
employee or organizational informational assets. This can be done by enabling volumes of stored
content to move from legacy silos to more-strategic — and often more-consolidated — repositories.
The content migration hype faded considerably last year (reducing its time to plateau down to less
than two years), but has become of considerable interest again (increasing its time to plateau up to
five years) because of the emergence of the cloud office. As cloud office migration gains
prominence in the next five years, organizations pushing information — and users — toward cloud
platforms, such as Microsoft Office 365/SharePoint Online, Google Apps for Work, IBM SmartCloud
or EFSS solutions, will look to such migration tools.
Content migration tools have improved significantly during the past year to cater for on-premises-
to-cloud migration. However, the absence of standards and uncertainty of service availability make

cloud-to-cloud migrations complex. Few organizations are embarking on such an effort today. This
complexity is also exacerbated by the fact that hybrid content architectures are left to inherently
manage the security risks associated with the integration of public cloud or hosted repositories (as
they have done with hosted email).
Companies in highly regulated industries, such as financial services and health sciences, that need
to account for all of their content will benefit from stringent, auditable and automated processing
using content migration tools. Organizations that have conducted an inventory of all their content
repositories and found that more than half of their content is outdated or casual should not waste
their IT budget on content migration tool and service purchases.
Maturity: Mature mainstream
Sample Vendors: AvePoint; Casahl; Dell; Metalogix; MetaVis Technologies; Sharegate; T-Systems
(Vamosa Technologies); Tzunami
Recommended Reading: "Adopt Four Best Practices to Make the 'Last SharePoint Migration'"
"Regain Control of SharePoint On-Premises Before Office 365 Forces You To"
"Three Alternative Strategies to SharePoint On-Premises"
Entering the Plateau
Portal-Less Portals
Definition: Portal-less portals provide personalized access to relevant information from multiple
sources, without using traditional portal server software. Approaches to portal-less portals vary and
include lean portal platforms, mashup and composite application platforms, web content
management (WCM) systems, and social software platforms. Most portal-less portals exploit
modern web-oriented architectures (WOAs), REST-based APIs and widgets to provide a simple,
flexible path to interoperability.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Simple portals are increasingly easy to build without
using traditional portal server products. Open-source web frameworks and components, enterprise
mashup assembly platforms, WCM systems with portal-like componentry and enterprise social
networking systems often offer means to similar ends. In some cases, they come without the
complexity, heavy infrastructure and long implementation times of traditional portal products.
The attraction toward portal-less portals is largely the result of frustration with stagnant or failed
portal projects and initiatives. In some cases, portal projects fall short on user adoption and deliver
few measurable business results. Business units and end users in many organizations have come to

view established portal products as restrictive, requiring heavy IT involvement and intervention
whenever they want to add an application or make a change. Rather than being a facility for
delegating administration and putting control into the hands of business units and users, many
portal projects have come to represent an IT bureaucracy. In the meantime, agile practices in web
development organizations call for far faster and more iterative approaches to portal development,
often better supported by portal-less portals.
However, portal-less portals have several weaknesses compared with traditional portal products
and platforms. First, organizations must be equipped with WOAs to avail themselves of portal-less
portals. Although widgets, the primary component models for portal-less portals are simpler to build
than standards-based portlets or web parts. However, without firmly established standards, they
may also be less capable of features like interportlet communication and context awareness.
Organizations with substantial web application development skills and best practices are more likely
to avail themselves effectively of portal-less portals than organizations preferring a buy versus build
approach.
Portal-less portals and lean portals are related constructs. Both derive from customer demand for
simplicity amid the complexity of more-traditional portals and their providers. However, the
concepts are orthogonal:
■ Portal-less portals represent nontraditional, technical approaches that reduce the burden and
responsibility of a portal server in delivering a personalized point of access and interaction to
users. Portal-less portals rely more heavily on client-side capabilities than traditional portals.
■ Lean portals represent resistance to the expanding functionality of portal suites and their user
experience platform (UXP) derivatives. Whereas UXPs have begun to encompass
comprehensive content management, search, collaboration, social, web analytics and mobile,
lean portals provide just-enough functionality to perform the essential portal role. Lean portals
can rely on either server-side or client-side technical methods.
Thus, portal-less portals have lean qualities, but not all lean portals are portal less.
Portal-less portals are also related, but not synonymous with "headless portals." Headless portals
provide an abstract "personalized point of access to relevant information, processes and people"
without being bound to any single interface. Headless portals are geared toward interoperating with
various front ends and operate by combining services like identity and access management,
personalization, content management, aggregation and orchestration.
User Advice: Traditional portal platforms tend to impose useful standards and best practices that
help ensure successful portal initiatives. Organizations deciding to use alternatives must ensure that
governance and management plans account for practices and standards typically orchestrated in
portal platforms.
Organizations with complex and multifaceted portal requirements are often better off using a
traditional horizontal portal platform.

Organizations having a strong in-house web app development team are often best equipped to
exploit portal-less portals. Organizations preferring a buy approach, as well as those relying on
system integrators, are often better served with a traditional horizontal portal offering.
Business Impact: Organizations with relatively simple access to many disparate systems and
resources, and those that have a thorough service-oriented architecture (SOA) or WOA foundation in
place, can use portal-less portals to provide useful interfaces more quickly than traditional portal
approaches. Portal-less portals can offer faster time to market, lower total cost of ownership (TCO),
more-satisfying user experiences and more-direct business value than traditional portal platforms.
However, portal-less portals are not adequate replacements for horizontal portals in some
situations. In fact, they act as complements to horizontal portals in many cases. Organizations
attempting to use portal-less portals for use cases that require interportlet communication, support
of granular levels of security and context awareness, and sophisticated composite applications
often incur undue complexity and costs because of custom development.
Sample Vendors: Backbase; DotNetNuke (DNN); Drupal
Recommended Reading: "A Platform Approach for Websites, Portals and Mobile Apps Leads to
Faster Time to Market and Improved User Experience"
"Get Ready for the "Portal-Less " Portal"
Web-Oriented Architecture
Definition: Web-oriented architecture (WOA) is a substyle of service-oriented architecture (SOA)

that leverages web architecture. It focuses on web services models, primarily RESTful modes of
interoperability. These services are frequently exposed through an open API model. WOA is the
primary model of application interoperability used by vendors and end users alike. Microservices is
the latest services approach leveraging WOA.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: WOA has dominated web interoperability models for
years. It was initially adopted by internet developers, then broadly by independent software vendors
and now, finally, has reached broad adoption by end-user organizations. While SOAP-based web
services technically fit within WOA, it is predominantly delivered via open RESTful APIs. Open
RESTful APIs and API governance/management technologies are used extensively, with use cases
varying from cloud service providers to enterprise software vendors exposing key services to
enterprises deploying API gateways for both internal and external use.

Mobile interactions are driving a large increase in the use of RESTful models, with mobile web and
hybrid models of mobile application development leading the charge. Bimodal methodologies are
enabled by RESTful APIs, exposing Mode 1 legacy application content to Mode 2 innovative
applications. We expect that this approach will reach the Plateau of Productivity next year. Growth
in the use of open RESTful APIs has also driven huge demand for API management technology.
User Advice: Application architects should use WOA principles to design APIs and should use
these principles, combined with web technology, for any APIs that are intended to be consumed
inside or outside the enterprise. Solution architects and application developers should look for
opportunities to leverage RESTful APIs, especially in use cases like mobile apps, exposure of
internal content to external parties, and exposing legacy application content for consumption into
new applications.
Business Impact: WOA allows web assets to be easily shared with other web resources and web
applications. It vastly accelerates the creation of new applications, especially mobile apps. WOA
allows content and data trapped in internal systems to be safely exposed to external third parties. It
is a key ingredient in bimodal IT.
Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience
Maturity: Mature mainstream
Sample Vendors: 3scale; Akana; Axway; CA Technologies; Dell Boomi; IBM; Mashery; MuleSoft;
SAP; Software AG
Recommended Reading: "Use Web-Scale IT to Make Enterprise IT Competitive With the Cloud"
"Bimodal for Applications Hinges on APIs"
"The API Economy: Turning Your Business Into a Platform (or Your Platform Into a Business)"
Appendixes

Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Web Computing, 2015
expectations
Tag Management
Server-Side JavaScript Web Real-Time Communications
UXPs Cloud Office
Microservices Event-Driven Web
Cloud Citizen Integrator Services (iSaaS) Public Web APIs
WebGL Portal PaaS
Web-Scale Application Architecture UX Tools
HTTP/2 Context-Enriched Services
Cloud UXP Services Lean Portals
High-Performance JavaScript Client-Side MVC
Methodological UX Design Native Mobile Development
Multivariate and A/B Testing
Semantic Annotators
Web-Oriented Architecture
JavaScript Everywhere Responsive Design
Portal-Less Portals
Web Components
Content Migration
Semantic Web Cloud/Web Platforms
Ambient Experiences HTML5
Web Notifications Mobile Web Apps
Social Analytics
Cloud Computing
As of July 2015
Peak of
Innovation Trough of Plateau of
Inflated Slope of Enlightenment
Trigger Disillusionment Productivity
Expectations
time
Plateau will be reached in:
obsolete
less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years before plateau
Source: Gartner (July 2015)

Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels
Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases
Phase Definition
Innovation Trigger A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant
press and industry interest.
Peak of Inflated During this phase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of well-publicized
Expectations 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 Because the technology does not live up to its overinflated expectations, it rapidly becomes
Disillusionment unfashionable. Media interest wanes, except for a few cautionary tales.
Slope of Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of
Enlightenment 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 The time required for the technology to reach the Plateau of Productivity.
Adoption
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

Table 3. Maturity Levels
Maturity Level Status Products/Vendors
Embryonic ■ In labs ■ None
Emerging ■ Commercialization by vendors ■ First generation
■ Pilots and deployments by industry leaders ■ High price
■ Much customization
Adolescent ■ Maturing technology capabilities and process ■ Second generation

understanding
■ Less customization
■ Uptake beyond early adopters
Early mainstream ■ Proven technology ■ Third generation
■ Vendors, technology and adoption rapidly evolving ■ More out of box
■ Methodologies
Mature ■ Robust technology ■ Several dominant vendors

mainstream
■ Not much evolution in vendors or technology
Legacy ■ Not appropriate for new developments ■ Maintenance revenue focus
■ Cost of migration constrains replacement
Obsolete ■ Rarely used ■ Used/resale market only
Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
"Understanding Gartner's Hype Cycles"
"Predicts 2015: The Impact of Digital Business on Web and Portal Technologies"
"Cool Vendors in Web Computing, 2015"
"Market Guide for User Experience Platforms"
"Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals"
"Improve User Experience With A/B and Multivariate Testing"
"Portals Unbound: How the Nexus of Forces Is Reshaping Enterprise Portals"

"The Great Portal Divide: How a Rift in the Portal Market Will Impact Your Web Strategy"
"Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management"

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Hype Cycle For Web Computing 290522

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G00290522

Hype Cycle for Web Computing, 2016

Analyst(s): Magnus Revang

Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases................................................................................................................. 71

Page 2 of 74 Gartner, Inc. | G00290522

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Web Computing, 2016.....................................................................................5

The Hype Cycle

Gartner, Inc. | G00290522 Page 3 of 74

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Source: Gartner (August 2016)

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benefit years to mainstream adoption

transformational Cloud Computing Conversational User

high Hybrid Mobile A/B and Multivariate Bots

moderate Portal-Less Portals Client-Side MVC Ambient Experiences

low Web Notifications

Source: Gartner (August 2016)

Off the Hype Cycle

■ Cloud UXP Services (incorporated into DXP)

Gartner, Inc. | G00290522 Page 7 of 74

Focus shifted to other Hype Cycles:

■ User Experience Platforms (UXPs) changed to Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)

Page 8 of 74 Gartner, Inc. | G00290522

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Sample Vendors: Kore; Microsoft

Event-Driven Programming Models

Gartner, Inc. | G00290522 Page 9 of 74

■ Rethink how they develop applications to leverage event-triggered services

Business Impact: Incorporating event-driven programming models into your application

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Sample Vendors: Amazon

Progressive Web Apps

Page 10 of 74 Gartner, Inc. | G00290522

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Sample Vendors: Google

Gartner, Inc. | G00290522 Page 11 of 74

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Sample Vendors: Philips Research

Page 12 of 74 Gartner, Inc. | G00290522

Definition: A continuous experience preserves continuity of user experience across traditional

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Continuous experience is an emerging approach to

Gartner, Inc. | G00290522 Page 13 of 74

Businesses should investigate opportunities where continuous experience orchestrated across

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Page 14 of 74 Gartner, Inc. | G00290522

IT leaders should consider the following:

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Recommended Reading: "Design Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Customer Experience

Gartner, Inc. | G00290522 Page 15 of 74

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Benefit Rating: Low

Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Sample Vendors: Apple; Google; Mozilla

Conversational User Interfaces

Gartner, Inc. | G00290522 Page 17 of 74

Benefit Rating: Transformational