During the late 90s the trend in web design and development firms was to grow, merge and aquire: consulting companies were struggling to be able to meet both the demand and diversity of services required by their clients. Companies either scaled by adding project teams or they divided the firm into resource pools each addressing the different services required on web projects. While this model started out as relatively efficient it did not scale as the capabilities of the web grew beyond initial expectations: simple design and development divisions grew to include information architecture, multimedia authoring, sound design, application development, video editing and production, game design, GIS development, system integration, IT management, hosting, etc. In addition, each of these specialists needed to be able to adapt to a diversity of client technology requirements: Java, Visual Basic, Perl, C++; Windows, Unix, Macintosh; etc.

In the end, the market strained to support the weight of dozens of huge conglomerates. It was impossible to effectively use all resources at any single time; most companies chose between resource availability and quality and the few that could maintain both did so at a tremendous amount of management and resource overhead. These costs were passed onto consumers. Many companies exceed 500 employees and found themselves unable to offer their services for under $200,000. The firms dwarfed the design and development firms that had given rise to the field of profession web development.

After the dot com bubble burst and companies returned to "conservative" (realistic) investment practices, few people could afford the services of the large companies. The demand for the benefits and promise of the web remained, however; to address this need, many of the most talented developers and designers returned to small web boutiques where they could offer exceptional levels of quality without the overhead that made such services cost prohibitive.

The boutique model, however, is not without challenge. Companies now have to evaluate the services of dozens of vendors and then manage to integrate their services. This is impractical and inneficient; The Ignia Network was born out of the need to solve this problem.

The Ignia Network was established initially by Ignia, LLC as a means of centralizing partnerships intended to help address the demands of Ignia's client base. Since then, The Network has spun off into ints own non-profit standards cooperative intended to facilitate the creation of ad hoc project teams that work together seamlessly to meet the objectives of clients.