As we continue to progress toward an Internet of Everything (IoE) digital world, organizations will need to think strategically about IT budgets and smart spending in order to keep pace with the changing landscape. CEO's want a flexible, adaptable enterprise, and IT needs to deliver "fast IT" for them to achieve that.

One part of this rapidly changing landscape is the rise of something Gartner calls the "Digital Industrial Economy." Gartner SVP Peter Sondergaard said recently at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo that the digital industrial economy will be built on the foundations of cloud integration, social collaboration, mobile, and data. As part of this, worldwide IT spending will reach$3.8 trillion by 2014.

The main notion of the Digital Industrial Economy is that every company will become a technology company, every budget will become an IT budget and every business will become a digital leader. By this definition, it's clear that the Internet of Everything-and the$14.4 trillion in value it will unleash-is at that the heart of this new economic model.

As IoE enables more connections between people, process, data and things, we will be able to make better decisions and choices than ever before. An increase in the number of connected devices and digitalization will result in the creation of new infrastructures and it will be imperative this infrastructure be programmable and virtualized, at great scale. Enhancing application service offerings, increasing provisioning speed and optimizing IT economics will all be infrastructure capabilities that IT departments must consider.

We are prepared for the Digital Industry Economy because we are already building it.

Cisco recently launched a new networking platform to prepare for the rapid growth of IoE and the Internet of Things. This product augments other recent Cisco capabilities like the eXtensible Network Controller, UCS Director and Connected Mobile Experience for Facebook Wi-Fi.

The Network Convergence System (NCS) provides excellent network agility, packet optical convergence, and petabits-per-second system scale.  These capabilities will give organization's IT leaders a better understanding of what's taking place within their network infrastructure from a data virtualization and security perspective.

By integrating the proper technologies, organizations can prepare themselves to take advantage of the new digital industrial economy.

How is your organization preparing? Leave a comment here or join the conversation on Twitter to add your thoughts.