Human progress can be read as a sequence of technological layers. Stone and bronze, the wheel and the arch, printing presses and windmills, steam engines and electricity, aircraft and computers, networks and batteries, mobile technology, cloud computing and AI, with quantum technologies and fusion potentially forming some of the next layers. Each generation builds on capabilities created before it. Today, billions of software components connect these layers into increasingly complex technological systems.
Accumulating Investment, Frequent Reuse
Two characteristics are particularly important.
New technological layers accumulate rather than simply replacing previous ones. Mainframes continue to process much of the world's banking activity. Steam turbines remain part of electricity generation alongside solar panels and batteries. Cloud platforms have not eliminated enterprise infrastructure either. In most organizations, they have become another layer alongside existing systems.
New technological frontiers increasingly require enormous investments. The steam engine already demanded capital on a scale that exceeded what individual workshops could easily provide. Modern semiconductor manufacturing requires fabrication plants costing billions. Governments have committed more than €43 billion in public funding to quantum technologies in 2026, while cumulative investment in fusion since 2021 has exceeded $14 billion, even though widespread commercialization remains some distance away.
This combination of rising investment requirements and the ability to reuse digital technology at almost no marginal cost has created what we call the global digital supply chain.
Instead of developing every technological capability themselves, organizations combine technologies created by thousands of other organizations and communities.
The Supply Chain From A User’s Perspective
Company specific application logic
At the top sits the technology that directly serves the organization's purpose. These applications implement the business logic required to manufacture products, serve customers, process transactions, coordinate logistics or provide public services. Large enterprises routinely operate dozens of such applications, with individual systems sometimes exceeding one million lines of code.
Software building blocks
Those applications are rarely developed from scratch. Engineers combine libraries, frameworks, runtimes and other components produced elsewhere. More than ten million open source projects alone are available, alongside countless proprietary alternatives. According to the 2026 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis Report, a typical audited codebase contains roughly 1,180 open source components, many of which were never selected directly but entered the application as dependencies of other components.
Infrastructure building blocks
Building an application is only part of the task. It must also run reliably, securely and continuously. This requires another technological layer consisting of infrastructure software, databases, networking, monitoring, orchestration and security tools. Organizations commonly operate hundreds of technologies across this layer. Each is itself software and therefore brings another chain of components and dependencies. Some are open source, such as Kubernetes or Prometheus. Others are proprietary, such as VMware vSphere or Datadog.
The tool mesh
The dependency network extends beyond the applications and infrastructure delivering the organization's products. Development environments, collaboration platforms, enterprise software and data services support the organization itself. Companies often use dozens or hundreds of software services simultaneously. Jenkins or Grafana may be operated internally, while services such as Salesforce, Miro or ChatGPT are consumed directly from external providers. Every one of these tools is again built on its own software, infrastructure and supply chains.
Data center hardware
Software ultimately depends on physical machines. Servers, storage systems, networking equipment, GPUs, power systems and cooling infrastructure form the physical foundation of the digital stack. These devices contain firmware and embedded software of their own, meaning the dependency chain does not end when software reaches hardware. It simply continues at another level. Vendors such as Dell, HPE, Cisco, Juniper, NetApp, Pure Storage or NVIDIA depend in turn on their own complex supplier ecosystems.
The upstream supply chain
Behind the hardware lies an even deeper industrial network. Semiconductors require refined silicon, specialty chemicals, photoresists, lithography equipment and highly specialized manufacturing facilities. Other hardware depends on rare earth elements and critical minerals. Data centers depend on electricity generation and grid infrastructure. Each input opens another chain of mining, refining, manufacturing, logistics, machinery and energy suppliers. The digital supply mesh therefore extends far beyond software and data centers into the physical industrial economy.
Innovation Through Reuse
Every organization that creates value with digital technology participates in this global mesh. Applications rely on components, components on infrastructure, infrastructure on tools and hardware, hardware on manufacturing ecosystems, and those ecosystems on materials, machinery and energy. All of this again relies on software which restarts the supply mesh again. New technological layers are continuously added while much of what came before remains in operation.
And that raises the next question: how can organizations possibly manage a technological system this complex? See the next chapter.
And that raises the next question: how can organizations possibly manage a technological system this complex? See the next chapter.
