I'm thrilled to share some exciting news. Sedai has been named in Gartner's inaugural Platform Engineering Hype Cycle, a significant milestone for our company. We've been recognized in two key categories: Autonomous Workload Optimization and AI Augmented Software Engineering.

Overview of the Hype Cycle and Top Themes

Gartner defines platform engineering as the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms to improve developer experience and scale agile and DevOps practices. Lead report author and Gartner VP Analyst Manjunath Bhat suggests, “Executives responsible for platform engineering initiatives should treat this hype cycle as a reference to carve out their organization’s strategic roadmap.” This Hype Cycle includes several technologies that have been rated “transformational,” including software supply chain security, which is expected to hit mainstream adoption within the next two to five years. According to Gartner, a transformational technology “Enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics.”

According to Bhat, Gartner groups the innovations in this Hype Cycle under five key themes:

1. Developer enablement — This includes internal developer portals, internal developer platforms, self-service environment management, innersource and software engineering intelligence platforms.
2. Building applications that are secure by design — This includes software supply chain security, curated open source software (OSS) catalogs, secrets management and cloud-native application protection platforms.
3. Effective and efficient software delivery — This includes green software engineering, AI-augmented software engineering, autonomous workload optimization, site reliability engineering and chaos engineering.
4. Navigating complexity of cloud-native architectures — This includes cloud development environments, observability, GitOps, FinOps, microservices, cluster fleet management and service mesh.
5. Supporting team structures — This includes Team Topologies and product-centric delivery models.

Gratitude and Recognition

First and foremost, I'd like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Manjunath (Manju) Bhat and Bill Blosen of Gartner for authoring this groundbreaking report. Platform Engineering has been identified as one of Gartner's top 5 strategic technology trends for 2024, with a prediction that 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams by 2026.

Manju's post highlights that both Autonomous Workload Optimization and AI Augmented Software Engineering contribute to the broader theme of "Effective and efficient software delivery." Both categories are on a relatively fast track to adoption, expected to reach steady state on the 'plateau of productivity' within 2-5 years.

Autonomous Workload Optimization

In the realm of Autonomous Workload Optimization, we're grateful to Pankaj Prasad and Hassan Ennaciri for updating the research initiated last year. It's encouraging to see autonomous capabilities mentioned in customer RFPs, indicating a growing recognition of the approach's merits.

At Sedai, we understand that the concept of 'autonomous' can be unsettling to some. That's why our team has developed a range of adoption modes - specifically datapilot, copilot, and autopilot modes - allowing companies to embrace autonomy at their own pace.

AI Augmented Software Engineering

Regarding AI Augmented Software Engineering, we extend our thanks to Arun Batchu for his early recognition of Sedai's unique AI aspects. We're also grateful to Oleksandr Matvitskyy and Jim Scheibmeir, Ph.D. for supporting the research in this category.

We appreciate the broader Gartner team's thorough work in mapping out the full array of AI techniques and clarifying when each is most appropriate. For Sedai's use cases, we've found that Predictive AI is currently the most powerful approach, surpassing GenAI in prediction/forecasting and decision intelligence capabilities.

Platform Engineering Leaders

Our progress wouldn't be possible without the platform engineering leaders we've collaborated with over the past year. Special thanks go to:

• Ramesh Nampelly, who's leading Platform Engineering at Palo Alto Networks. Ramesh spoke at our annual autocon conference last year, demonstrating how autonomous optimization complements platform engineering by optimizing cloud infrastructure and reducing toil. I encourage you to follow Ramesh on LinkedIn for insights into their ongoing journey.
• Suresh Sangiah and Matthew Duren, who led Platform Engineering at KnowBe4. Matt also spoke at autocon, while Nate Singletary delved into the application of autonomous optimization for AWS ECS.
• Moied Wahid and the Platform team at Experian, whose work we hope to showcase more in the future.

As we continue to innovate and push the boundaries of autonomous optimization and AI-augmented software engineering, we're excited about the future of platform engineering. Stay tuned for more developments from Sedai and our partners in this rapidly evolving field.

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