Welcome to the 2004 Hype Cycle Special Report. This year, more than 50 Hype Cycles feature the status and progress of emerging technologies and trends in a broad range of technology, application and vertical-industry topic areas. Gartner's Hype Cycle highlights the progression of an emerging technology from market overenthusiasm through a period of disillusionment to an eventual understanding of the technology's relevance and role in a market or domain. The Hype Cycle is an educational tool that helps explain why technologies should be adopted based on your individual needs and goals, rather than on the generic levels of hype and disillusionment in the marketplace (see "Understanding Gartner's Hype Cycles"). The Technology Hype Cycles provide a snapshot of emerging and maturing technologies in 20 IT domains, including security, open source, the portal ecosystem and wireless networking. Use these Hype Cycles as a checklist of technologies that may be relevant to your future business processes or IT infrastructure. See "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2004" for an overview of the technologies that will be most transformational in their impact within the five- to 10-year time frame, and those technologies that are noteworthy due to overhype or recent maturity. The Application Hype Cycles highlight technologies that are driving and contributing to 16 key enterprise application areas, such as the knowledge workplace, supply chain management and enterprise resource management. Use these Hype Cycles to track the maturity of various application features and capabilities, and to anticipate when a technology will reach a level of maturity that matches your company's adoption comfort zone. The Industry Hype Cycles take a vertical perspective on key emerging technologies and trends in 16 industries. Some topics are industry-specific — for example, reinsurance e-marketplaces for the insurance industry or price optimization for retail — while others show the variation (or commonality) between hype and adoption in an industry compared to the broader IT community, such as the adoption of Web services in each industry. Use these Hype Cycles to keep pace with the technology developments that will most impact your industry. The following interactive Hype Cycles show the evolution of key technologies and trends for seven vertical industries: The following research focuses on industry trends and the changes that key technologies will deliver in 10 vertical industries: 
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