The incredible recent advances in connectivity, artificial intelligence, automation and other technology tools have made companies of all types look for ways to deliver digital experiences to its customers. And efficient software development is key.

Now seven years old, feature management startup Catamorphic Co. (aka LaunchDarkly) has grown by improving the enterprise software delivery process. It offers a platform for feature management that leverages feature flags to enable faster software delivery and better product experiences, according to John Kodumal (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of LaunchDarkly.

“The exciting thing about LaunchDarkly as a platform is we really provide two capabilities,” Kodumal said. “For engineering teams, we help you mitigate risks, we help you move more efficiently … and then you get product managers the ability to measure the impact on their customers.”

Through company R&D investments, combining risk mitigation and customer impact allows organizations to quickly deliver business value to customers, according to Kodumal, who spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed new market demands as every company becomes a software business, how LaunchDarkly improves software delivery and enables faster innovation, and its partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

Reducing risks and increasing control

A fundamental feature that LaunchDarkly provides is the separation between the processes of deploying software and releasing software, according to Kodumal. Typically, when a company deploys new software, it packages the artifact, places it on its servers, and then all of its customers try out that new version at once. This means that if things go wrong, the entire customer base is affected.

“The first piece of value that we provide is we help you sort of reduce that risk, so when you release a change, you can deliver that change to a much more targeted, smaller, safer cohort of users, measure the impact of what’s going on,” he explained.

LaunchDarkly allows companies to rapidly scale release and roll-out.

Through the partnership with AWS, LaunchDarkly is helping companies that are either just starting their public cloud journey or making significant migrations to this infrastructure. These organizations use the platform to control the release of those changes and mitigate risk, according to Kodumal.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated demand for LaunchDarkly’s solutions as companies needed to be more digital and adapt to changing market conditions.

“We had customers in — for example, food delivery that needed to rapidly change the way their software behaved in response to changes in regulations or guidelines around things like COVID — and our platform really was transformative for many of those organizations … to become more flexible and adapt, not only to changing rules and regulations, but changing consumer behavior and changing end-user behavior,” Kodumal explained.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: LaunchDarkly (Catamorphic Co.) sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither LaunchDarkly nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE