Gartner Trends: Platform Engineering for Real Estate
Among the predictions of Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends 2023 is the increased importance of platform engineering. This approach to an overarching integration of the developer and end-user experiences will be invaluable to the real estate and property management markets.
“Many real estate owners are outgrowing their current technology, but the good news is that cutting-edge real estate businesses are adopting a platform engineering approach, and in the next few years, this investment in tech will start to return, company-wide.” Andrew Day, Travtus.
What is Platform Engineering?
A general movement in technology trends is towards systems featuring flexibility to personalize individual business needs combined with standardization to improve efficiency. In the case of platform engineering, the main gist is, in the words of Gartner itself, improvements of “the developer experience and productivity by providing self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations.”
In other words, platform engineering will streamline how software developers work, enabling them to produce business-specific IT solutions more quickly, ultimately optimizing operations for the user, whether that user is a community manager, website contributor or potential client. It’s all about the link between the company infrastructure’s complex guts and the external user.
How Does it Work?
Platform engineering works by optimizing the efficiency of the developer or development team. It is all about integration and interface. Gartner believes 80% of software engineering organizations will create platform teams by 2026. These will provide the services to deliver the applications, ultimately solving “the central problem of cooperation between software developers and operators.”
Modern software architecture is increasingly complicated, and businesses like real estate and property management will have built up a patchwork of off-the-shelf and partially customized applications. While this may have offered a short-term solution, it is not an efficient, optimal long-term solution. With platform engineering, developers will address end users’ specific needs, then develop and curate a suitable, integrated package of tools and processes. This will increase productivity and efficiency for end users and reduce their “cognitive burden“ – the stress on human brain power elicited by relying on that older patchwork.
Case Study: Nike
Developers will start with internal developer portals (IDPs) and then extend from there, embedding security in all platforms early in the development process. Viable commercially available engineering platforms will become available with flexible customization.
The Gartner report gives an example of the US brand Nike. As a multinational dealing in multiple areas – notably athletic shoes but also other sportswear, equipment and services – the company’s needs are complex and disparate. Gartner reports they are using “composable platforms.” Composable is a tech buzzword referring to a standardized but modular approach to systems development. This structure integrates worldwide elements of the business, resulting in improved scalability, more agility in the marketplace, and reduced operational costs.
Platform Engineering for Real Estate
Ultimately, platform engineering is another deployment of emerging technology that will improve efficiency in complicated businesses - like those of Real Estate Owners and Operators. Simply put, the speed and ease of integrating new systems and the removal of the dependence on vendors to implement change, means end-users from Community Managers to Accountants will have better software at their disposal, optimized for their roles.
Paul Delory, VP Analyst at Gartner, says platform engineering will “help end users and reduce friction for the valuable work they do” thanks to “operating platforms that sit between the end user and the backing services on which they rely.”