Is your platform ready for 2025? New research on platform engineering reveals the secret to success

Platform engineering, one of Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends for 2024, is rapidly becoming indispensable for enterprises seeking to accelerate software delivery and improve developer productivity. How does it do that? Platform engineering is about providing the right infrastructure, tools, and processes that enable efficient, scalable software development, deployment, and management, all while minimizing the cognitive burden on developers.

To uncover the secrets to platform engineering success, Google Cloud partnered with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) on a comprehensive research study of 500 global IT professionals and application developers working at organizations with at least 500 employees, all with formal platform engineering teams. Our goal was to understand whether they had adopted platform engineering, and if so, the impact that has had on their company’s software delivery capabilities. 

The resulting report, “Building Competitive Edge With Platform Engineering: A Strategic Guide,” reveals common patterns, expectations, and actionable best practices for overcoming challenges and fully leveraging platform engineering. This blog post highlights some of the most powerful insights from this study.

Platform engineering is no longer optional

The research confirms that platform engineering is no longer a nascent concept. 55% of the global organizations we invited to participate have already adopted platform engineering. Of those, 90% plan to expand its reach to more developers. Furthermore, 85% of companies using platform engineering report that their developers rely on the platform to succeed. These figures highlight that platform engineering is no longer just a trend; it's becoming a vital strategy for organizations seeking to unlock the full potential of their cloud and IT investments and gain a competitive edge.

Three keys to platform engineering success

The report identifies three critical components that are central to the success of mature platform engineering leaders. 

1. Fostering close collaboration between platform engineers and other teams to ensure alignment 

2. Adopting a “platform as a product” approach, which involves treating the developer platform with a clear roadmap, communicated value, and tight feedback loops

3. Defining success by measuring performance through clear metrics such as deployment frequency, failure recovery time, and lead time for changes 

It's noteworthy that while many organizations have begun their platform engineering journey, only 27% of adopters have fully integrated these three key components in their practices, signaling a significant opportunity for further improvements.

AI: platform engineering's new partner

One of the most compelling insights of this report is the synergistic relationship between platform engineering and AI. A remarkable 86% of respondents believe that platform engineering is essential to realizing the full business value of AI. At the same time, a vast majority of companies view AI as a catalyst for advancing platform engineering, with 94% of organizations identifying AI to be ‘Critical’ or ‘Important’ to the future of platform engineering.

Beyond speed: key benefits of platform engineering

The study also identified three cohorts of platform engineering adopters — nascent, established, and leading — based on whether and how much adopters had embraced the above-mentioned three key components of platform engineering success. The study shows that leading adopters gain more in terms of speed, efficiency, and productivity, and offers guidance for nascent and established adopters to improve their overall platform engineering maturity to gain more benefits.

The report also identified some additional benefits of platform engineering, including:

• Improved employee satisfaction, talent acquisition & retention: mature platforms foster a positive developer experience that directly impacts company culture. Developers and IT pros working for organizations with mature developer platforms are much more likely to recommend their workplace to their peers.

• Accelerated time to market: mature platform engineering adopters have significantly shortened time to market. 71% of leading adopters of platform engineering indicated they have significantly accelerated their time to market, compared with 28% of less mature adopters.

Don't go it alone

A vast majority (96%) of surveyed organizations are leveraging open-source tools to build their developer platforms. Moreover, most (84%) are partnering with external vendors to manage and support their open-source environments. Co-managed platforms with a third party or a cloud partner benefit from a higher degree of innovation. Organizations with co-managed platforms allocate an average of 47% of their developers’ productive time to innovation and experimentation, compared to just 38% for those that prefer to manage their platforms with internal staff.

Ready to succeed? Explore the full report

While this blog provides a glimpse into the key findings from this study, the full report goes much further, revealing key platform engineering strategies and practices that will help you stay ahead of the curve. Download the report to explore additional topics, including:

• The strategic considerations of centralized and distributed platform engineering teams

• The key drivers behind platform engineering investments

• Top priorities driving platform adoption for developers, ensuring alignment with their needs

• Key pain points to anticipate and navigate on the road to platform engineering success

• How platform engineering boosts productivity, performance, and innovation across the entire organization

• The strategic importance of open source in platform engineering for competitive advantage

• The transformative role of platform engineering for AI/ML workloads as adoption of AI increases

• How to develop the right platform engineering strategy to drive scalability and innovation

Download the full report now.