LaunchDarkly, provider of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing which features of an application can be accessed by end users, has acquired Houseware, maker of a solution for applying analytics to product development using generative artificial intelligence (AI)
At the same time, the company is also previewing native integration with the Snowflake data lake which provides the foundation upon which the Houseware product analytics platform runs.
Collectively, these efforts will extend the reach and scope of the LaunchDarkly product portfolio beyond the realm of software engineering to now include a set of capabilities that can be applied more broadly to digital business transformation initiatives, says Claire Vo, chief product and technology officer for LaunchDarkly. “It takes us beyond being used for experimentation,” she adds.
At its core, the LaunchDarkly platform makes use of feature management to make it simpler for organizations to experiment with new digital services by providing more granular control over how they are accessed, which then enables organizations to more easily test those services or limit access to them based on a tiered subscription model.
Houseware adds a platform that provides access to a generative AI copilot that makes it simpler to surface, for example, what products and services are being consumed most profitably.
Combined with a features management platform, it then becomes easier to successfully test and deploy new capabilities faster at a level of scale that would have been previously too difficult to effectively manage, notes Vo. The ultimate goal is to bridge the divide that often exists between product development and software engineering teams, she adds.
It’s not clear how product development will evolve in the age of AI but many organizations have been simply overwhelmed by the amount of data that needs to be analyzed in the digital era. As a result, opportunities are lost simply because actionable insights that could have surfaced in the data being collected were simply missed.
The Houseware platform provides product managers with the equivalent of a digital assistant that highlights issues and trends that may warrant additional investigation.
Software development teams have, of course, been employing feature management since the 1970s to isolate the development of various components into a branch that can be worked on and tested in isolation without impacting the rest of an application. LaunchDarkly has extended that concept using a SaaS platform that makes it simpler for organizations to apply the control required to segment various elements of an application from one another.
At the core of that capability are what are known as feature flags, aka feature toggles or feature switches. These make it possible to dynamically turn services on or off based on who is accessing them. Rather than being limited to the application development process, the feature flags are now also being employed in production environments to deliver multiple types of digital services to various classes of users of an application.
The level of digital business transformation that has been achieved, naturally, still varies widely from one organization to the next. However, the one thing that is apparent is that AI might soon narrow that gap by making it simpler for more organizations to make that transition faster than ever at a level of scale that might have once seemed unimaginable.
