(FORTUNE Magazine) – Today's Internet poster boys are retail Web companies like Yahoo, Amazon.com, and eBay. But another class of Net company--one that matters more to your business--is starting to get respect and win astonishing valuations.

These companies--BroadVision (worth $1.1 billion), Inktomi ($4.2 billion), Marimba ( $1.1 billion), DoubleClick ($3.4 billion), and many others, most still privately held--supply software that runs the computer systems used by eBay and its ilk. That's only a part of their potential. I'm beginning to think that the kinds of customer-centric applications they offer will be the basis of information-technology architecture for the entire economy. If I'm right, all businesses will soon have to adopt a customer-focused approach to IT. That's why I say that these companies and their products make up the Wheel of Fortune of the new economy.

I started thinking about this Wheel of Fortune after puzzling over why so many companies, old and new, have trouble building an interactive Website that reflects up-to-date, accurate information about their customers--like me. Why doesn't eBay provide me with a current transaction history? Why doesn't it accept payments online? Why can't L.L. Bean's site remember that I order two pairs of blue jeans about the same time every year? Why do software companies require me to type in my registration number, even if their products are installed and running on the very PC I'm using to connect to their sites?

This is the new, key question companies must ask themselves: Where in the IT infrastructure is the customer? At a lot of companies, the computer systems don't know about the customers. The systems know about manufacturing or distribution or accounting or employees. The closest that most systems come to knowing about customers is in customer-support applications that run corporate call centers. But in these apps, the key database is not customers themselves--it's the customers' problems and how they were resolved.

The truth is, until recently IT managers designed systems to deal with everything but customers. Who ever imagined that customers would interact directly with a company's information systems through the Internet? Customers were an afterthought. Even in companies with direct consumer relationships--brokerages, banks, power utilities, credit card companies, catalog marketers, magazine publishers--the IT people thought only about issues like how to efficiently handle monthly billing. So they designed the systems to deal with customers in bulk and to retain only the most essential information.

The Net has changed all that so dramatically that the systems must be redesigned. The key now is to put customer data at the center of the IT infrastructure. The Wheel of Fortune describes this new architecture: The customer database is the hub; arrayed around it are five spokes with systems for processing transactions, managing content, acquiring new customers, providing customer service, and marketing to customers. Transaction processing: Unlike the other spokes, which depend on software that's been created in the past three or four years, this one consists of traditional systems that run key functions of "brick and mortar" companies: accounting, manufacturing, distribution, enterprise resource planning, and so forth. All these need to be integrated into programs for credit card transactions, auction management, and so on, that handle real-time buying and selling over the Internet.

Content management: For years software for publishing content has focused on the design of pages for magazines, books, brochures, or presentations. Now software is available that allows any company to display up-to-the-minute data in useful, readable fashion on a Website. Content has been redefined to include anything Web users might interact with, be it data, software, or classic content like text, audio, or video. This spoke includes companies like Vignette and 2Bridge (a company my VC firm has an investment in), which help Websites with on-the-fly publishing of pages, and companies like Marimba, which manages the distribution of content and software.

Customer acquisition: For many companies this simply means buying applications that deliver ads to the customers they want to woo. But a new kind of Web software, called affiliate-management programs, can track your customer as he moves across the Web visiting other sites. If he buys something at a site you've affiliated with, you'll get a cut of the purchase. Another part of this spoke is services like the one offered by the Media Metrix consulting firm that measures the effectiveness of ads on the Web.

Customer service: Some of today's enterprise-software companies supply systems for customer service--those programs that manage the 1-800 call centers you dial into when you have a problem. But as we all know, these programs don't exactly provide customer service. What's developing now is software that truly does serve customers via e-mail, telephone, fax, and chat rooms. The only way this stuff will really work is if it's integrated into other systems that make up the Wheel of Fortune.

Customer marketing: This spoke is the most fascinating, because it has been completely reshaped by the Web--in fact, in its new form it wouldn't be possible without the Web. Think of it as "one-to-one marketing" brought to life. The idea was introduced in a 1993 book by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers called The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time. It proposed that technology could be used to customize marketing for millions of customers. At the time, the technology wasn't good enough to do that. But now the Internet has tied everybody together, and a small group of newcomers including Connectify (another company that our firm has an investment in), Responsys, and Personify has developed tools to help companies market directly to individuals in volume. Customer-marketing software keeps track of customer preferences--learned either by watching transactions or by keeping track of online forms filled out by customers who reveal what they would like in the way of products and marketing.

Many of the Web's best e-commerce companies have built their IT systems around the Wheel of Fortune (of course, they didn't have a name for what they're doing until this very column). As time passes and the Internet becomes more and more a key part of our lives and economy, every company will have to adopt these systems. Old-line companies can't afford to let newcomers be the only ones to integrate customers into every aspect of their business. So virtually every company will need systems that can adapt to the real-time access of a customer database. If all these corporate systems must be redesigned to conform with the Wheel of Fortune, the software providers will be very fortunate indeed. They may well become tomorrow's poster boys of the Internet.

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. Alsop may be reached at stewart_alsop@fortunemail.com; the column may be bookmarked at www.fortune.com/technology/alsop/.