In August, the Gartner Group released its yearly Hype Cycle report and graphic that plots its estimation of where emerging technologies are in terms of market expectations and technical and business realities. Notably, the Internet of Things was placed at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, positioned to fall into the Trough of Disillusionment. This week in an interview with a Gigaom researcher, IBM’s Paul Brody, VP of Internet of Things, generally concurred with this Gartner prognosis.  Brody was speaking at Gigaom’s Structure Connect event in San Francisco which put an emphasis on the consumer IoT and home automation in its program.

[It’s] a classic bubble phase,” said Brody, referring to a glut of half-baked business plans that are based on connecting an everyday device to the internet, and then selling the harvested data. He added that it’s a waste of time for companies to start storing every piece of data they can get their hands on, and that some firms say they want to do this just because they hear that’s what everyone else is doing…According to Brody, the current problem with IoT mania is that people are presenting it as a visionary idea, rather than a series of tactical innovations.“I’m a big believer that the internet of things will grow one very compelling use case at a time,” he said.

A Cisco exec gave another nuanced answer to a similar question in September. Speaking to Networked Globe, Maciej Kranz, VP of the Corporate Technology Group of Cisco said

Rather than being one separate item on the Gartner hype cycle, the IoT is really made of dozens of different technologies that are mostly on the Plateau of Acceptance themselves. Because we’re all working as an industry to make it real, it will go through the disillusionment phase quickly and soon be a reality.” 

With collaborative efforts like the just released IoT Reference Model, it does seem that Cisco, Intel, IBM and other big IT companies are working together in an open-source manner to make that happen.