Excellence Without Compromise: What's Possible for Platform Teams in 2026 and Beyond

The Perfect Storm: Complexity, Skills Shortages, and the 24/7 Reality

The numbers tell a compelling story about why we're excited about 2026 and beyond.

16% Time developers spend actually coding

90%+ Organizations facing IT skills shortages by 2026

$5.5T Global cost of skills shortages

IDC reports that developers now spend only 16% of their time actually coding. The rest consumed by operational tasks: CI/CD implementation (12%), security (13%), monitoring (12%), and infrastructure management.

Meanwhile, over 90% of organizations will face IT skills shortages by 2026, costing an estimated $5.5 trillion globally.

True 24/7 coverage is challenging. Here's the math every engineering leader knows but few discuss openly: sustainable 24/7 coverage requires 10 full-time engineers minimum.

168 hours per week ÷ 40-hour work weeks = 4+ engineers just to cover the hours, but that assumes engineers will accept rotating nights, weekends, and holidays without issue

2 engineers per shift for redundancy and reliability = 8+ engineers

Reality: 3 engineers can cover Monday–Friday, but one engineer cannot realistically cover 48 hours of Saturday–Sunday alone, requiring at least 2 additional engineers for weekends.

6–8 weeks annual leave, training, and sick time (reducing availability ~15%) = 10 engineers to maintain true 24/7 coverage

Anything less creates coverage gaps, on-call burnout, turnover risk, and increased incident probability.

Platform Engineering's Moment And OpsWerks' Opportunity

Gartner forecasts that by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams up from 45% in 2022. This isn't hype; it's recognition that modern software delivery requires dedicated infrastructure teams who treat platforms as products, not projects.

But here's what recent Forrester research revealed: when choosing application modernization and managed services providers, customers prefer single vendors who handle both modernization and ongoing operations on a 4-to-1 basis over splitting between multiple providers.

Organizations want partners who own outcomes, not timesheets.

What a Decade of Partnership Teaches Us

For the past decade OpsWerks has been the trusted partner to the world's most demanding platform and infrastructure DevOps and SRE teams. We've delivered managed services that help them operate and support mission-critical systems at scale.

Our Managed Services Model: predictable pricing, aligned incentives, and functional services teams delivering your outcomes; not weekly timecards, random bodies or headcount.

What We Manage:

Multi-Cloud Operations 24/7 operations and support for business-critical infrastructure across your entire public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. We modernize infrastructure, including Kubernetes orchestration; enabling you to run demanding workloads like AI/ML at production scale.

Complex Migrations Execute high-stakes migrations with zero downtime. Recent project delivered 10x faster completion and 90% cost savings compared to internal estimates with zero unplanned downtime.

Incident Response & Monitoring Full ownership of monitoring, alerting, and incident resolution. We proactively maintain stability so your developers can focus on building and deploying applications serving millions of users.

Why Managed Services Beat Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation gives you headcount you still can't find. Managed services give you outcomes delivered by teams already in place.

We don't bill hours we own results. Predictable costs, guaranteed SLAs, and a team incentivized to deliver operational excellence, not maximize timesheets. No heroics required. No burnout. No gaps.

2026: Bringing Excellence to More Teams

This year's theme for us is Up for Excellence and I'm super excited about what that means.

Our team is energized and ready. We've proven the model works at scale with the world's most demanding infrastructure teams.

We've expanded significantly within existing customer organizations because the results speak for themselves: developers who actually code instead of managing infrastructure, fewer incidents, faster delivery, predictable costs, and teams that don't burn out.

Now we're focused on identifying other platform, DevOps, and SRE teams facing the same impossible math; teams running business-critical systems where downtime isn't an option, where hiring 10 engineers for 24/7 coverage isn't realistic, and where excellence shouldn't require heroics.

With Gartner predicting $723.4 billion in public cloud spending this year (up 21.5% from 2024), the infrastructure you're managing is only getting more complex, more critical, and more demanding. The talent shortage isn't easing. The operational burden isn't shrinking.

But the path to sustainable excellence is clearer than ever.

I'm optimistic about the year ahead. Our team has the experience, the energy, and the commitment to help more organizations operate at the highest level; without compromise.

Are you up for it?