Sustaining engineering, according to Greyhound Research chief analyst Sanchit Vir Gogia, is rarely a stable equilibrium, rather a holding pattern that makes eventual absorption or shutdown less disruptive for the parent company, in this case, Salesforce.
When a product or platform enters the sustaining engineering phase, engineering focus shifts from building new value to containing risk, momentum fades, product, sales, partnerships, and talent move elsewhere, and in fast-evolving cloud ecosystems, the platform steadily loses relevance for developer workflows, and when a platform loses internal political capital, reversal is uncommon, Gogia added.
Similar cadences, historically, Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting, noted, have preceded managed decline scenarios across the industry.
