The shift to AI-native infrastructure has raised the stakes for platform engineering, turning execution quality into a direct driver of business performance.
Platform engineering has reached a critical juncture. The discipline has evolved from an emerging trend to an enterprise operating system, fundamentally reshaping how organizations deliver applications. Platform engineering is “eating the world”—absorbing traditional silos like operations, observability, security, data, and FinOps into unified paradigms. Yet this transformation carries significant risk: execution matters more than ever.
The data reveals a stark divide. 40.9% of platform engineering initiatives can’t demonstrate measurable value within their first twelve months, leaving them vulnerable to defunding or deprioritization. Yet 35.2% of teams deliver tangible value within just six months. This gap isn’t about technology or budget. It’s about approach. Success gap is driven by leadership choices and operating models, not just team-level execution.
These insights emerge from the 2025 State of Platform Engineering Report Volume 4, published by platformengineering.org and sponsored by Broadcom as exclusive supporters of the research. Based on insights from 518 engineers, the report examines what separates successful platform engineering initiatives from those that struggle. The findings hold critical implications for CIOs navigating the shift to AI-native infrastructure.
For technology leaders, the question is no longer whether to invest in platform engineering, but how to ensure your investment delivers measurable business value—and how to do it fast enough to stay competitive.
Five critical takeaways for CIOs
1. Culture over technology: The true success factor
Here’s a wake-up call: cultural and organizational barriers outweigh technical ones. The top challenges for platform teams aren’t about technology—they’re about people:
- Driving developer adoption (the #1 challenge)
- Establishing a shared vision or product mindset
- Securing executive buy-in
- Overcoming limited product management capabilities
The report makes it clear: platform engineering succeeds where culture supports it, and fails where it does not. As a CIO, the role isn’t just to approve budgets and timelines—it’s to champion the cultural transformation required, including organization design, funding continuity, executive sponsorship, and accountability. This means driving mindset shifts across the organization, ensuring clear alignment between teams and leadership, and fostering genuine collaboration that breaks down traditional silos.
2. Adopt a platform-as-a-product mindset
The most successful platform engineering initiatives treat the platform as a continuous product, not a one-off project. The report shows that only 36.6% of organizations have dedicated Platform Product Managers, yet those with product-focused approaches consistently outperform those without.
CIOs need to champion the platform-as-a-product mindset:
- Dedicated ownership: Consider investing in Platform Product Managers who own the platform roadmap and user experience
- User-focused development: Ensure platform teams continuously gather feedback from developer users and iterate based on their needs
- Strategic alignment: Platform evolution should be explicitly tied to business goals, not just technical improvements
The data shows that 45.5% of organizations have dedicated, budgeted platform teams, but they remain mostly reactive. The gap between reactive and strategic platform operations is where CIOs can drive platform-as-a-product mindset mandate.
3. Start small, fail fast, scale strategically
The report reveals a powerful insight: 35.2% of the teams deliver measurable value within six months using an MVP (Minimum Viable Platform) approach, while 40.9% of platform initiatives can’t demonstrate value within their first twelve months.
CIOs must ensure teams are empowered to define focused “golden paths” that cover 80% of common needs to standardize and automate quickly. They use an iterative approach completed in weeks, not months. This de-risks the initiative and demonstrates measurable value quickly to key stakeholders.
The organizations that succeed:
- Start with one high-impact use case and prove value
- Iterate rapidly based on user feedback
- Scale gradually as adoption grows organically
- Avoid the “boiling the ocean” trap of trying to solve everything at once
4. Guide teams to metrics that matter
Despite improvements from last year, nearly 30% of platform teams still don’t measure success at all. This is a critical vulnerability that cripples the ability to prove ROI, secure investment, and guide decision-making.
CIOs should guide their platform teams toward measurement excellence. The successful organizations leverage KPI like DORA metrics, time to market, and SPACE metrics to evaluate platform impact. CIO must coach and mandate teams to establish robust measurement frameworks and create urgency around proving value through data.
When platform teams see measurement as their responsibility—not a burden imposed from above—they become invested in demonstrating impact. CIOs who guide their teams to embrace measurement from day one create cultures where teams proactively identify struggling initiatives and course-correct before resources are wasted.
5. The AI-native era demands a dial platform mandate
The most significant finding from this year’s report is the fundamental shift from the cloud-native era to the AI-native era. An overwhelming 94% of organizations view AI as critical to the future of platform engineering, and 86% believe platform engineering is essential to realizing AI’s business value.
CIOs now face a dual mandate:
- AI-powered platforms: Integrating AI tools to augment Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs), enhancing developer productivity and driving automation
- Platforms for AI: Building specialized infrastructure for deploying, training, and scaling AI/ML workloads
With 75% of organizations already hosting or preparing to host AI workloads, the time to act is now. Yet challenges persist: 57% cite skill gaps, and 56% identify hallucination risks as major concerns. CIOs can drive executive ownership of AI risk management, skills strategy, and platform readiness. Platform strategy must address both opportunities and challenges head-on.
How VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) enables platform engineering success
The challenges outlined in the State of Platform Engineering Report aren’t just industry observations—they’re problems that demand immediate solutions. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) delivers comprehensive platform engineering capabilities. Three stand out as particularly critical:
AI-ready infrastructure: VCF includes VCF Private AI services as part of the platform. VCF Private AI services enable privacy and security, simplify infrastructure management and streamline model deployment. They include capabilities such as GPU Monitoring, Model Store, Model Runtime and more. By embedding all the benefits of Private AI into VCF, enterprises can get a unified platform for their AI and non-AI workloads without an additional purchase.
The recent ML benchmarks also show that VCF virtualized environments perform on par with bare metal deployments.
Rapid time to value: VCF’s automation and self-service IaaS capabilities accelerate platform delivery for all types of applications VM, container, and AI. Fleet Management automates full-stack lifecycle operations, cutting operational overhead by 60%. According to an aggregate study of 138 customer environments, VCF delivers 61% faster deployment of new workloads—critical when platform teams need to prove ROI within six months.
Built-in observability: VCF Operations provides comprehensive observability with tenant-level utilization tracking, chargeback capabilities, and alert management. This eliminates the “we need to build metrics infrastructure first” delay that prevents teams from measuring success at all.
The path forward: Building your platform engineering future
Platform engineering is the enterprise operating model of the modern decade. The divide is clear: 35.2% demonstrate value in six months and thrive. 40.9% struggle to prove ROI in twelve months and risk defunding.
CIOs should benchmark their organization’s platform engineering maturity, understand the complete landscape of challenges, and develop and execute next steps.
Explore VMware Cloud Foundation to accelerate your platform engineering journey with AI-ready infrastructure, rapid automation, and built-in observability.
The successful 35.2% invested in people, culture, and the right foundation. The choice is yours.
