Going forward, every company must look at taking whatever IT functions they have—whatever customer communications, whatever support, whatever data access abilities—and bringing them to the Web.

It’s that clear. And the only way for businesses to get there is with the help of solution providers.

SPs need to help their clients bring their business to the Web and into the digital age quickly, or those companies risk being irrelevant

“The era of Digital Business has arrived, in which successful companies are defined by their ability to respond quickly and effectively to transient business moments,” according to a recent report by Gartner. “Established approaches to IT infrastructure, operations and software development—still well suited to more traditional back-office applications of IT—simply do not offer the speed, flexibility and scalability needed to enable value creation from business moments,” the research giant said.

It comes down to this: Going forward, businesses that embrace digital or Web-scaled IT will be better positioned than those that do not, according to Gartner. This goes for every business. Because even if your customers are not in the IT space, their customers are digitally savvy and need to be reached that way. Also, the efficiencies, flexibility and pure computing power that come with evolving technologies such as cloud computing are a tremendous asset to any organization.

What is Web-scale IT? 

According to Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner, “It’s a term coined by Gartner to describe the new approaches to computing pioneered by cloud services firms such as Google, Amazon, Rackspace, Netflix, Facebook and so on. These approaches potentially enable orders of magnitude of improved service delivery when compared to many of their enterprise counterparts.”

Gartner has identified six elements to Web-scale IT, noted Haight in a prepared statement: industrially designed data centers, Web-oriented (or microservices) architectures, programmable management, velocity-focused processes, a collaborative organization style, and an innovation-centric and learning culture.

It also includes any changes to IT infrastructure and applications that enhance development operations, which is where many organizations begin, Haight added. This includes the actual hardware, servers and data centers. A Web-scale approach makes them more efficient to operate because companies are not necessarily always replacing the actual hardware but are instead dealing with the application side.

“When more computing power or storage is needed, there’s no need to re-architect the entire system, just add more nodes,” he said. “If a node breaks, just replace it with another, because applications have usually been designed to accommodate infrastructure failure.”

Now, let’s not be delusional. Going Web-scale does not mean the business will grow to the likes of Facebook, Google or Amazon. However, being Web-facing is the future—it allows organizations to scale faster and cheaper, adapt more quickly, and interface with customers in the manner in which their customers demand.

In fact, “a smaller business could achieve a higher IT velocity than its bigger rivals through Web-scale IT, enabling first mover advantage with new opportunities,” according to Haight. “In addition, through a mixture of cloud services and in house equipment that is right for their organization, a Web-scale approach can turn IT into a tangible competitive advantage for smaller companies in the way it has for Internet giants. Web-scale techniques are applicable to organizations of many sizes, and can be adapted to support a wide range of business outcomes.”

There is no turning back. Solution providers are the very lynchpin to helping customers become more Web-facing. Both of your businesses depend on it.

Knock ‘em alive