The drive for digital transformation has transformed how IT, the development team and business managers work together. Or, put another way, digital transformation has paved the way for IT, the dev team and business to work together. There’s really no other choice, as a balance among business goals, automation, security, business continuity and an agile, software-defined infrastructure is key to getting—and staying—ahead of the competition.

Indeed, 50 percent of CEOs said they expect their industries to be substantially or unrecognizably transformed by digital, according to Gartner’s “2016 CEO Survey: The Year of Digital Tenacity.” But even if a company doesn’t see itself as being digitally transformed (or, at least, not any time soon), no company can succeed in today’s economy without pushing its current digital envelope.

In any case, getting there won’t be easy, and it won’t happen overnight, especially when it comes to SMBs, which tend to have limited IT resources and budgets. That’s where channel partners come in: It’s their job to help their customers understand why there’s a need for digital transformation and to help them achieve it.

The Technology Behind Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is all about the business, but it takes technology to make it happen. Integrated clouds, more modern data centers, digital workspaces and enhanced data center security are all pieces of the puzzle, and it takes a number of different products and services—implemented in a cohesive way–to put them all together. But if there’s one technology that can help partners move themselves and their customers more smoothly along the digital transformation path, it’s virtualization.

Partners must support extended use of virtualization on the network and in the cloud, providing the ability to develop, test, iterate, update and scale reasonably and rapidly. Virtualization will help them enable customers to move more quickly and safely, bringing products—and profits—to market faster.

Specifically, virtualization helps customers accelerate digital transformation by:

It’s a tall order, but virtualization can bring partners and their customers closer to digital—and business—transformation.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.