The business world is in the middle of a major transformation, mainly caused from the rapid pace of technology innovation. I’ve said it many times before that mobile technologies and cloud computing have changed not just the way organizations target and interact with their customers but their entire businesses processes as well.

Those organizations that don’t change with the times will fail. It is so crucial to adapt that digital business incompetence will cause 25 percent of businesses to lose market position to their competitors, according to a recent Gartner report.

I’ve also said this before: Solution providers are the key to the future of the success of businesses moving forward with IT/digital strategies. Never before, since resellers started offering value-added services to business in the past 20 years, have solution providers been in such an opportunistic position.

However, to fill this IT needs gap, solution providers need to evolve as well. They need to align and adapt their own organizational structure, capabilities and customer approach to meet the increasing needs of their customers, according to Gartner.

“All signs suggest that organizations have just begun to tap into the potential of digital business; however, organizations that don’t accelerate their digital business transformation will lose market position,” said Allie Young, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, in a prepared statement. “Service providers can help organizations with the innovation and industrialization required to transform into digital businesses over the coming decade.”

The opportunities are enormous for the solution provider community. So much so that Gartner predicts that by 2017, 60 percent of Global 1000 organizations will execute on at least one revolutionary and currently unimaginable business transformation effort. This will not be possible without the help of strong solutoin provider partners. There are business changes that are going to take place that organizations don’t even realize yet. It’s like when former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “We know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Wait. What? That was the initial reaction. But as time passed people began to realize that he was saying there are things out there that we don’t know about and we don’t know that we don’t know about it. Regarding IT, businesses are in the same boat. There are technologies that will change their business in a fundamental way that they don’t know about and they don’t even know they don’t know. They are going to need their solution provider partners to know.

Gartner also said that by 2023 such digital transformations will result in leading four out of five industry leaders to reposition their brands or build new ones. All due to digital and IT changes.

“The market opportunity arising from broad technology changes is creating a digital business opportunity that is forcing a restructuring in strategy, talent, portfolio and organization within services providers,” said Susan Tan, research vice president at Gartner, in a prepared statement. “In the past 12 months service providers have taken explicit steps to prioritize the pursuit of digital business opportunities ranging from restructuring and realigning their organization to forming entirely new business units or subsidiaries. They have announced new digital leaders and investments to organically build or acquire digital skills/assets and many have launched innovation centers to serve as client development labs. The restructuring and new digital business units and leadership are needed to focus investment and develop resources for applying digital technologies to realize business value.”

Solution providers must invest executive time with their customers in future planning and not just transactional businesses to capitalize on this transformation and truly preserve their customers, according to Gartner.

There are two main areas Garner has identified that solution providers must focus on with their customers:

The only way for organizations to be prepared for what is coming digitally and to thrive going forward is to strengthen their relationships with solution providers. In turn, solution providerss must do their part and change their role to increase their sphere of influence. Exciting times are on the horizon.

Knock ’em alive!