It is an approach that has many benefits. For example, it helps meet the challenge of keeping up with new skills in the E-Business world, where skills can become obsolete in weeks and months rather than years. The 'second wave' of the E-Business revolution has shown how quickly a local business can become global. The net gives you a potential customer base that is truly global - provided you are geared up to its needs. And that means finding effective ways to serve customers in many different time zones - in other words 24x7.
Revenue lost by downtime is often revenue lost forever.
Whatever your IT solution, you will need many pieces of technology from many vendors, with new ones being added all the time. The result can be a field day for buck-passers. It can therefore make a lot of sense to seek a partner willing and able to function as prime contractor, taking full responsibility for the total solution. At the end of the day, it can be nice to know that if things go wrong, there is a single clear-cut point of accountability for putting them right. Integration is a factor you cannot afford to neglect.