It’s September 2025, and the writing’s on the wall for anyone still running platform engineering as a series of bespoke, hand-rolled projects. The “build it yourself” ethos that shaped the early days of internal developer platforms (IDPs) now feels almost quaint. Why? Because the market — and the demands on tech teams — has moved on at lightning speed.
We’re well past the inflection point: If you’re treating your platform as an internal project and not a strategic product, you’re setting yourself up to lose. The do-it-yourself drive may have been noble, but it’s simply not scalable — or sustainable — in today’s world.
Platform as Product: A 2025 Reality
Treating a platform as a product used to be a talking point in keynotes — now it’s the bare minimum for survival. The “Platform as Product” mindset means you serve internal developers with the same intentionality and rigor that your company serves its customers. This means roadmaps, user feedback loops, strong documentation and product managers are actually accountable for the platform’s success.
Recent findings from Futurum Intelligence show that in 2025, more than 80% of enterprise platforms are now managed as products, not projects—a massive leap from even early 2024. This is where business value is proven: Platforms that evolve, are well-supported and drive measurable productivity gains for engineering.
The Vendor Takeover: Opinionated, Integrated and Cloud-Native
If you haven’t surveyed the platform landscape lately, brace yourself. The days of piecing together dozens of open source components with glue code are fading fast. Instead, vendor-backed, opinionated platforms are dominating the conversation — and the budgets.
Here’s what’s hot heading into Q4 2025:
– Humanitec has expanded its orchestration muscle with native AI-driven cost optimization and compliance guardrails, making dynamic policy enforcement a click rather than a quarter-long project.
– Backstage is still the open source heart of the movement, but its commercial options have exploded. Spotify’s managed Backstage and Roadie’s new “Backstage Pro” now offer out-of-the-box AI-powered cataloging, workflow automation, and plug-and-play compliance modules. The latest CNCF survey puts Backstage adoption at over 58% of Fortune 500 engineering orgs — an all-time high.
– VMware Cloud Foundation and SUSE DevX have both doubled down on AI/ML features, multi-cloud support and robust integration layers—pushing past last year’s security scares with certified compliance for financial and healthcare sectors.
– Microsoft’s Azure Dev Hub and Google Cloud Application Platform both unveiled major releases this summer, each with generative AI “platform copilots” that help developers, SREs and platform engineers troubleshoot, optimize and even refactor underlying configurations automatically.
– Open Source is still thriving — Backstage, Kratix and Crossplane continue to anchor flexible, community-driven solutions. But enterprise adoption trends show most teams are layering in commercial support from the start.
Notable Open Source Spotlight:
– Kratix has emerged as a powerful open framework for building custom platforms, gaining traction among organizations looking for Kubernetes-native extensibility.
– Crossplane continues to power multi-cloud and hybrid cloud provisioning as code, and new 2025 releases have added deep AI-automation hooks for managing cloud sprawl.
Commercial vs. Open Source: Where the Rubber Meets the Road
The tension between open source flexibility and vendor-backed support is as sharp as ever. Open source is the birthplace of new ideas and architectural innovation — but in 2025, commercial distributions are what most enterprises trust to scale.
The numbers back this up: Per The Futurum Group’s latest platform trends brief, nearly 75% of new enterprise platform adoptions this year bundled a commercial subscription or managed service layer within the first six months. This hybrid approach delivers the best of both worlds—open APIs, extensible foundations and ironclad support.
By 2027: Buy, Don’t Build
Let’s get predictive, because the trendlines are crystal clear. If current adoption rates hold, by 2027, as many as 90% of enterprises will buy or subscribe to platforms instead of building from scratch. The economics are irrefutable — why sink millions competing with hyperscalers and specialized vendors when you can have a turnkey solution that covers 80% of what you need on day one?
“Shimmy” Experience: Good News, 80/20 Rules, and the Death of Not-Invented-Here
Here’s where my own scars come in. Whether it was wrangling Lotus Notes/Domino servers, keeping PeopleSoft running, or getting Oracle Apps to play nice in the dot-com ASP days, I learned early: No platform ever delivers 100%. The absolute best you get is about 80% out-of-the-box — there’s always that 20% that needs custom glue to fit your workflow, compliance quirks, or legacy systems. But nowadays, with the sheer quality and breadth of platforms — both open source and commercial — there really is something for everyone.
And that old “if it’s not built here, it’s not good enough” mentality? It’s not just anachronistic, it’s anti-scale. There’s no business justification for burning cycles replicating what vendors and open source communities have battle-tested for years.
AI: The Make-or-Break Platform Differentiator
If your platform in 2025 isn’t leveraging AI — whether it’s for self-healing automation, predictive scaling, pipeline optimization, or developer productivity — you’re not just behind: You’re failing. The latest generation of platforms weaves AI throughout the stack, from intelligent cost optimization to automated documentation and smart onboarding. If your platform doesn’t have an AI roadmap, your competition will eat your lunch.
The Final Word: Products Win, Projects Lose
To sum up: The data is clear, the market is mature, and the choices have never been better. Whether you buy, subscribe, or adopt open source with commercial backing, treat your platform as a product, not a project. Focus on business value, developer delight and the relentless march toward greater scale and velocity.
Anything else? You’re not just doing it wrong… you’re not doing it at all.
Want to dive deeper? Connect with The The Futurum Group’s up-to-the-minute research and explore the CNCF’s latest platform data for even more insights.