Out of a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being “Excellent,” here’s how the survey respondents rated the different Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) processes:

• Development management: 2.78
• Demand management: 2.74
• Release management: 2.65
• Requirements management: 2.58

The biggest challenges? Deploying on time without issues, clarifying business needs, reusing requirements – these were just some of the top challenges our survey respondents highlighted.

So what should IT organizations do? In a nutshell, they should revisit their deployment process and find the right balance between speed and control in order to ensure they can repeatedly, quickly and confidently deploy their applications. They also need to invest more in requirements processes to help everyone share requirements across a complex technology and organizational landscape.

To get more personalized recommendations and to see how you stack up against your peers, take the IT Benchmark for Application Development. You can download the full research report “IT Trends and Outlooks: Why IT Should Forget About Development” immediately after filling out the 5-minute questionnaire.

SunGard is a leading software and technology services company with more than 20,000 employees serving 25,000 customers across 70 countries. SunGard Institutional Asset Management is an application service provider (ASP). With global financial institutions relying on their services to be available 24×7, the company needed to streamline processes and phase out its aging IT Service Management (ITSM) solution that was built using Lotus Notes.

Quinn goes through:

• Challenges with an outdated Lotus Notes-based service desk solution
• Key requirements for a modern ITSM solution
• Evaluation and selection criteria
• Implementation and rollout plan
• ITSM vision for the company

Check out the video on YouTube and see why Serena was this industry giant’s solution of choice!

Why DevOps?  With online applications being the business, enterprises cannot afford long delays in application development and application enhancement.  Every new feature that can be delivered can generate additional income; and the sooner that feature is delivered, the sooner the income is realized.  DevOps addresses the long-standing divide between App Dev and IT Ops and improves the speed that applications are delivered.

How are they working together?  Sometimes organizationally they are merging or teams are being created.  Recently, at the DevOps Days in Austin, I met development and release engineers who are parts of newly formed DevOps teams.  But these DevOps teams are still in the minority when considering how organizations are delivering DevOps.  More often than not, DevOps is being realized by improved collaboration by the different Development and Operations teams.

How do these disconnected teams, Dev and Ops, work together, especially after so many years of division?  They have different goals and different processes; yet these goals and processes must be combined, connected, or consolidated in order for DevOps to succeed.  Regarding goals, Dev is all about creating new apps and features to reduce risks, reduce costs, improve performance, and/or increase revenue.  Meanwhile, IT Ops’ role is to move new features and apps into production as expediently, efficiently, and effectively as possible.  Traditionally, this meant that App Dev moved quickly and IT Ops moved prudently, often butting heads in the process.  Now, they can’t butt heads; they must work together.

Regarding processes, each group has had its own set of processes which haven’t been well connected.  The hand off between the groups has thus been negatively affected.  And this is one of the most critical challenges that needs to be addressed for DevOps to succeed.  Orchestrating Development Management processes with Release Management processes will ensure that critical application release information is not lost and that DevOps can deliver on its goal – to deliver new apps and new features expediently, efficiently, and effectively so that the business can increase revenue and reduce costs.

If you’re looking for a DevOps solution, read the Ovum Rainbow Map for DevOps, a third party analysis of available DevOps vendors.  According to the report, Serena Software demonstrates comprehensive coverage for a DevOps solution.

We created Doug Serena, CIO to educate people about the benefits of Orchestrated IT in a fun and fresh way.  The results have been gratifying, both anecdotally and quantitatively.  We’ve heard from customers, analysts and journalists that it provides insight into the real goings-on of senior IT leadership teams in a way never before seen.  And now we see that the videos have been viewed a couple thousand times.

Keep a look out for more Doug Serena, CIO news and tweets!

Respondents of the Federal User Group survey include a mix of IT people working in the Federal sector, including at civilian agencies, defense agencies, system integrators and government contractors. The results were particularly interesting when compared to a similar, private sector-focused study that Serena performed last year at Gartner’s AADI Summit.

For instance, Standardizing Methodologies was the number one application development priority in the Federal survey, but ranked number four with private-sector respondents (there were a total of eight priorities in both studies). In addition, Automating Tasks was more important to the Federal group, reported as the number three priority, but was near the bottom of the responses from the Gartner AADI Summit. At the other end of the spectrum, respondents from the Gartner AADI Summit ranked Agile Development near the top in importance (number two priority), whereas it fell near the bottom in overall importance for Federal respondents. Interestingly enough, the hype of cloud computing was lost on both sides as both Federal respondents and those surveyed at the Gartner AADI Summit had Moving Apps to the Cloud as their least important priority.

While development priorities may differ according to the research, all IT organizations agree on key initiatives including these three in the order below:

1. Management of application development as a business process;
2. Central or federated repository for all application development artifacts;
3. End-to-end traceability from production back to requirements.

So what does this research tell us? While the Federal sector may consider Agile less important among all their different IT priorities (compared to the private sector adopting Agile methods more often), it has in fact adopted more forward-thinking automated development processes than the private sector.

Reducing overall application development costs and delivering applications faster are undoubtedly key priorities to both sectors. How each sector gets applications released into production is what varies.

Read more details about the top development issues for Federal IT professionals.

This year we are looking for topics in the following categories:

• Orchestrated Business Engagement & Visibility – your Serena solutions that support how the business interacts with IT
• Orchestrated Application Development – for those implementations of Serena solutions you have created that support the software development teams
• Orchestrated Application Delivery – how you have used Serena solutions to automate the release and deployment processes
• Orchestrated Service & Operations – how your Serena solutions control your service management environment
• Mainframe Solutions – your opportunity to show how you use Serena mainframe solutions in your business
• Serena Business Manager (SBM) – how you have used the SBM platform to build solutions in support of your business and IT needs

You should aim to present for about 30 minutes with 15 minutes for questions. The audience loves detail and really likes to hear about the challenges and how you overcame them.

When you submit your idea, make your description as interesting as possible. Remember, we want the very best of the very best for the conference. If you are selected to speak, we will give you a free pass to xChange 2012 (worth $1,995).  You will be notified whether or not your proposal has been accepted.

Submit your ideas now!  The closing date for submissions is May 31, 2012.

Good luck and see you in Vegas!

I was in China to work with a technology component manufacturer who was looking to overhaul their development processes and toolsets. They need to keep pace with the business which operates in the fastest growing area of technology and faces serious global competition. In the past two decades they have brought in numerous tools to address the individual needs of the developers, testers, business analysts, project managers and so on. And, while these had clearly improved the work delivered by the individual groups in the lifecycle, the client felt there must be something more they could be doing.

Serena’s Value Engineering team set about the analysis and discovered that the client was correct. Productivity and quality was indeed very high from each of the individual groups. But the developers were frustrated by trying to use agile development methods with tools designed for a different time: “we’re trying to go faster but we’re wearing wooden sneakers” one team leader said. The release managers were struggling to coordinate changes across the heterogeneity of the code streams for back office systems and mobile apps, embedded code and web code. The development teams were using individual and siloed instances of many different code repositories. And these code repositories were also decades old and not designed to meet the needs of modern, configuration-based release management.

But most of all, the real issue that was draining resources, was the lack of traceability between the lifecycle stages. The incomplete, inaccurate or inconsistent content that was handed off downstream in the lifecycle was adding many days of rework, duplication and error correction to the whole process. It seems as though everyone had fixed all the problems in their own organization but had not fixed the boundary conditions. Estimates of the wasted effort varied but a picture soon emerged that it could be as much as 20% per person. This figure alone represents tens of millions of dollars (USD) of value in the organization that should be liberated and turned into improved quality, product content and time-to-market. When the other areas of improvement, such as error reduction and the elimination of duplicated effort, are factored in, the potential capacity that can be returned to the organization represents staggering amounts of value.

This client also wants to preserve their existing investment tools that they have purchased, and the ones they have developed themselves. They do not want to sweep away the tools they know and trust with something new and generic.

Serena’s Orchestrated IT approach surprised and delighted them. They realized they would get the connections between the siloes addressed and they’d get to keep their investment in tools with proven heritages and important historical data. But what really impressed them was the ability to derive role specific dashboards in real time that combined data from their existing tools and from their process being automated. The current process is all based on spreadsheets and is entirely manual.

I am looking forward to going back there and seeing their success in a few months after our deployment team has completed their work.

Last week, in episode four, the tension between “Team Doug” and “Team Brad” grew to a boiling point as the release date for Millennium quickly approached. We were also introduced to Doug’s “kids”, and the important trip to India he and his wife hoped to take to finally meet them. Not only the future of Doug’s company, Qlarius, but also the chance of meeting his sponsored children hinges on Millennium’s success!

In the final episode, Doug and his team celebrate a successful early release of Millennium. With a simple keyboard click, Doug releases Millennium into production, turning his team into instant Qlarius rock stars and heroes. While Brad is relieved about the application’s success, something new grips him, stress, as it is now the sales team’s turn in the company spotlight to capitalize on the new application by closing some new business in a hurry. In the end, the development and release of Millennium using Serena’s Orchestrated IT System helped Qlarius turn a corner, and also helped some orphan children in India to meet their sponsors from the other side of the world.

Enjoy the show and don’t forget to participate in our daily trivia contest, which runs through April 20^th, for a chance to win prizes.

Among those responsible for both distributed and mainframe application development and delivery, there was surprise and delight that the upcoming Serena Dashboard will extend out of the box KPI metrics (process and data) across both distributed and mainframe environments; and with the news that ChangeMan ZMF will be encompassed in Serena Development Manager and Serena Release Manager solutions. As today’s increasingly multi-tier applications span platforms and technologies, it is comforting to note that the Serena Dashboard will provide a single pane of glass for insight and visibility across Application Development and IT Operations, enabling timely decisions for faster cycle-times, streamlined collaboration, and elimination of waste.

Try out the Serena Dashboard yourself with the interactive demo!

• Serena Service Manager for the IT Products and Services for Service Delivery category;
• Serena Release Manager for the Application Delivery category.

Winners will be announced on May 8, 2012 during an awards dinner and presentation in Las Vegas.

Coming on top of the recent Pink Elephant ITIL Innovation of the Year Award, which also recognized these two solutions, this latest accolade burnishes Serena’s IT management credentials, especially in the areas of DevOps and ITSM.

See all of the Network Products Guide category finalists.

It’s been an award-winning year for Serena so far in 2012.  In addition to the above, Serena has also been named to the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s Top 25 Software Companies list and was named Champion in the Agile ALM category in Info-Tech Research Group’s most recent Vendor Landscape report.

Wow.  And it’s only April.

What is “IT Intelligence” exactly? IT Intelligence is insight into all IT processes, tools, infrastructure, mainframe and more. It’s not just reporting on release status or seeing the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for a help desk team. It’s understanding how all IT processes, data and metrics all relate to each other, so IT can be as effective as possible.

IT Intelligence allows everyone from IT executives to team members to external stakeholders to understand what’s going on across all IT. For example:

• IT management: can see cycle times for each step needed to deliver what the business needs, as well as potential bottlenecks across all teams and projects
• Business users: know the status of all their enhancement requests and have visibility into which release trains they are slated for
• Business analysts: have full traceability across all requirements, code, test plans associated with the business demands
• Developers: can view cross-project development and QA cycle times, amount of turnovers, requirements and test coverage, etc.
• Service reps: can view SLA metrics for different types of requests

IT Intelligence isn’t just BI reinvented. IT needs insight without all the custom programming, long deployments and rigid modeling that plague traditional BI tools. In order for IT to gain better knowledge and understanding, IT Intelligence should be:

• Quick to deploy
• Work across any IT process, platform and tool
• Easy to adapt to changing tools or processes
• Highly personalizable for anyone in the IT value chain

I encourage you to see IT Intelligence for yourself. You can try out an interactive demo of our new Orchestrated IT Dashboard.

In episode three, the point was driven home that the fate of not only Doug’s team, but also the entire company hinges on the success of the release of the Millennium application. This knowledge has Brad even more on edge about Doug’s abilities as CIO, though he does make time to spy in on a working session of Millennium in action. It is in this working session that optimism grows for Doug’s team about the application’s success as they witness the powerful performance metrics of the IT team in action through the Serena Dashboard.

Episode four highlights the growing tension between “Team Doug” versus “Team Brad” as the release deadline for Millennium nears. In fact, Doug sees firsthand Brad’s level of trust, or lack thereof, on the chances of Millennium’s success. We are also introduced to a personal side of Doug as he discusses the orphans living in India that he and his wife proudly sponsor. If all goes well, Doug and his wife will have the opportunity to finally fly to India and meet “their” children in person.

You too can help a child in need by donating to SOS Children’s Villages, an international aid organization that supports orphans around the world. Sponsor a child online here: https://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/sponsor.

Enjoy the show and don’t forget to participate in our daily trivia contest for a chance to win prizes.

In fact, we’re even using some of the lessons learned from Malcolm’s seminar to improve our own measurements to heighten an already high focus on our customer outcomes, like successful implementations and customer reference-ability.  Because at the end of the day, if our measurements are completely in line with yours, then that heightens everyone’s chances of success.

For a look at our award-winning ITSM solution, come see us at the HDI 2012 Conference & Expo in Orlando from April 24-27.

We launched the Doug Serena, CIO web miniseries a couple of weeks ago and it’s already a big YouTube success. To add to the fun, we decided to kick off a related Twitter contest. This scavenger hunt-style trivia contest offers @DougSerenaCIO Twitter followers a chance to win Starbucks Cards for watching the series and answering simple questions about his show.

The contest kicks off today, Monday, March 26,2012 at 12:01am ET and will end on Friday, April 20, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Anyone care to guess where in the world Doug and his wife are hoping to travel on the trip mentioned in episode three? There is a hint in the episode of a certain mountain that might be close to their destination. Figure it out and you could win the prize.

Each business day, our favorite CIO will pose a question like this via Twitter about a past episode of Doug Serena, CIO. Anyone who follows @DougSerenaCIO and watches the miniseries can easily find the answer and submit for a chance to win a $20 Starbucks Card.

Questions can come at anytime of the day, so make sure you are keeping an eye on @DougSerenaCIO via Twitter. When you know the answer to one of the Doug Serena, CIO trivia questions, just tweet it to Doug!

Enjoy the show…

For official rules and prize information, please visit:

www.serena.com/ScavengerHunt

In episode two, we learned how a potential hurdle was crossed when Doug’s earlier decision to Orchestrate IT helped solve what could have been a project-killing operational issue. In addition, we saw how Serena Service Manager helped Qlarius save $600K.  We also got some color on Doug’s nemesis, Brad, the ever so skeptical SVP of Sales.

Episode three is dominated by a strategy session where Doug’s team witnesses first-hand the process visualization benefits of deep dashboard metrics. The team’s ability to deliver the Millennium project hangs in the balance. Monday’s episode also provides insight into why Michelle is the “Tigris” of Doug’s team, and why the timing of Jason’s latest family edition could have been better. You’ll also see Brad’s continued “enthusiastic support” of the project.  

Anyone care to guess where in the world Doug and his wife are hoping to travel on the trip mentioned in episode three? There is a hint in the episode of a certain mountain that might be close to their destination. Figure it out and you could win a $20 Starbucks Card in the upcoming Doug Serena, CIO trivia contest that will soon kick off on Twitter. Starbucks Cards will be awarded daily and at random to someone who answered the trivia question correct that day in this scavenger hunt-style contest. Stay tuned to @DougSerenaCIO for details!

The Info-Tech Research Group Vendor Landscape reports recognize outstanding vendors, assessing them by the strength of their offering and their strategy for the enterprise. The report pays tribute to the contribution of exceptional vendors in a particular category, in this case Agile ALM.  Serena has a proven history of success delivering innovation in the field of agile-based application delivery and lifecycle management for more than a quarter century, so it is quite an honor to be recognized. 

Using Serena’s orchestrated agile development, IT organizations can coordinate disparate processes, multiple tools and globally distributed teams from initial business request all the way to final production release. Serena orchestrates agility by helping IT engage more rapidly and accurately with the business, accelerate globally distributed water-scrum-fall development, and deliver more frequently to production – all while maintaining enterprise visibility and compliance to corporate and regulatory standards. 

Info-Tech highlighted Serena as the only vendor included in the report to earn “Feature Fully Present” across all 11 evaluated features. They characterize Serena as “a complete package controlled by a complete business process engine.” This underscores our commitment to offering our customers a complete tool set of features and functionality, powered by a flexible process-driven platform. And even if a customer chooses not to 100 percent “rip-and-replace,” their ALM suite with ours, Serena’s ALM products integrate with other products. This is truly unique to the development industry.

The miniseries includes five 5-minute webisodes, viewable here at Serena.com/DougSerenaCIO or on our YouTube channel. While it features Serena’s Orchestrated IT solutions, it’s designed to be entertaining and of interest to non-Serena technology shops as well.  

In last week’s premier episode we were introduced to the crisis engulfing Qlarius and the idea on how IT can save the day through the development and delivery of a sales application, Millennium. We are also introduced to the main players, including Doug’s stellar team and the ever so skeptical SVP of Sales, “Brad”. 

Tune in on Monday to see how a potential hurdle is crossed when Doug’s earlier decision to Orchestrate IT helps solve what could have been a project-killing operational issue. Also see how the use of the award-winning Serena Service Manager system helps save the company $600K and tons of time through its innovative visual composition capability. 

Brad and Doug’s team weigh in on working with Doug, and past Qlarius CIO’s, which includes a white board diagram you have to see to believe.

While Orchestrated IT may be revolutionary, it has come about through evolutionary means, having evolved from our early work orchestrating application delivery and more recent work orchestrating IT service management.  

Watch the new Doug Serena, CIO miniseries that just premiered to see the transformative power of Orchestrated IT.  In five short videos, this savvy CIO and his intrepid team show how they developed, delivered and serviced a breakthrough app that allowed their company to turn the tables on an arch competitor. 

We hope that Doug Serena, CIO will spark lots of conversation in the industry about how IT leaders can rise up to help lead their companies to huge commercial success. 

We’re also taking Orchestrated IT on the road, with a world tour that will touch down in nearly 30 cities over the coming months.  Is one of them near you?  Please join us if it is. 

Finally, we believe that enterprise IT matters more than ever in our online, personalized, mobile economy.  We believe that every industry can benefit from Orchestrated IT.  We believe that it is insane to rip out tools that are working, especially when you can orchestrate them into a new and better whole.  And we believe that giving IT stakeholders an easy way to engage in critical IT processes is the path to huge success for IT and IT leaders. 

Orchestrated IT is our solution for acting on those beliefs.  Send me a note if it makes sense for you.

We created the new web miniseries “Doug Serena, CIO” to answer these questions and to show the benefit of orchestrating IT.  It’s a hero’s journey through major business challenges, setbacks and personal frustrations to the Promised Land of boardroom-level business success. 

It was fun to bring this idealized story to life and we think it will be fun to watch.  But the goal is to be informative about how IT leadership teams can use Orchestrated IT systems to help them take their rightful place as boardroom players and heroes. 

The miniseries includes five 5-minute webisodes, viewable here at Serena.com/DougSerenaCIO or on our YouTube channel.  While it features Serena’s Orchestrated IT solutions, it’s designed to be of interest to non-Serena shops as well. 

The premiere episode is viewable now.  It sets the stage by dramatizing a crisis engulfing the business and the need for IT to come to the rescue.  I hope you find it an interesting and worthwhile way to spend 5 minutes. 

Follow @DougSerenaCIO or subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified next Monday and each week thereafter when new episodes get posted.

In recognition of this achievement, Serena President and CEO John Nugent awarded the 108-strong Serena xChange team the Gold Award for customer excellence, which comes with a monetary prize. The team decided that this money should be used to create a legacy that would bring some value outside Serena. Much discussion spawned the idea for the Serena Charity Challenge. 

At xChange 2012, customers, partners and Serena employees will be invited, individually or in small teams, to compete to develop a workflow application for a selected charity.  The SCC will take place on Sunday, September 9 and the winner will be announced the same day. The winning process app will be donated to the selected charity, along with the computers, communications and software licenses necessary for the charity to operate it.  We are in the process of choosing  the charity and welcome your suggestions. 

To contend in the Serena Charity Challenge please contact me or the SCC project leader Siddhartha Goel.  We look forward to a great competition that will benefit a fantastic cause! 

Register for xChange 2012!

Yesterday was a big day for Serena.  We won the Pink Elephant Innovation Award for our Serena Service Manager and Serena Release Manager integrated solutions.  We also had significant conversations with hundreds of attendees at the Pink12 conference where the award was given out.

This leads to several observations:

1. ITSM is undergoing a generational revolution.  First gen systems from Remedy, Peregrine (now HP), CA and others are at the bitter end of their duty cycles.  Customers in this most mature of IT management markets are actively looking for something new.
2. First gen cloud-based ITSM systems aren’t cutting the mustard.  I spoke with more than a few SaaS ITSM pioneers who are stymied by inflexibility, lack of upgradability and poor response time.  Wow.  Weren’t those problems supposed to be left behind with the ERP-like systems of the past?
3. ITSM and Release Management go together like sugar and spice.  The Innovation Award judges were clearly taken with the novelty of how Serena Service Manager and Serena Release Manager both bridged the DevOps divide and provided a new level of service responsiveness.
4. Serena was so right to accept our customers’ invitation to provide an ITSM solution.  Many had made great progress with their ITIL initiatives using Serena Business Manager alone, but figured that an off-the-shelf, Pink-certified solution from Serena that incorporated a highly effective CMDB would help them go to the next level.  Thank you for pushing!
5. Pink Elephant runs a great conference.  Educated, passionate attendees streamed to our booth, each one bubbling about what they were getting out of the sessions they’d attended.  We vendors also felt appreciated.  Thank you David and George.

Want to see the 1 minute video we submitted along with the Serena highlight of the award ceremony?  Click here.

The good news is that people are getting better. In fact, the International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA) is just one example of an organization promoting best practices for requirements management. And on February 16, Serena will be participating in an IIBA webcast on requirements traceability. This should be a very enlightening webcast, as requirements experts will be sharing their experiences from the field. Serena will share how our customers have been experiencing increased satisfaction by looking at the entire requirements process and managing traceability from initial request all the way to release. I encourage you to register for the webcast on the IIBA website.

Registration is now open and we have held the 2007 price for another year! Register by June 1^st and save $400! Get even more savings when you take your whole team. 

It’s about the community exchanging ideas.

This year, more than ever before, xChange will be about you. With more customer speakers, more sessions devoted to real world application of Serena solutions and more opportunities to interact with your peers, xChange 2012 will honor its name. 

We are currently looking for customer speakers. If you have used a Serena solution to solve a real world problem and you want to share that with the xChange community please write to me and let me know what you’d like to talk about. 

We will focus  on the practical application of the product sets and will group the sessions according to the Orchestrated IT approach we introduced at xChange 2011. The tracks will be:

• Orchestrated Apps: the application development process
• Front office: Serena’s new solution for demand management
• Application delivery: what’s new with requirements management and configuration management
• Development management: the visibility necessary to run a development organization
• Release management: the latest in release control and release automation
• Orchestrated Ops: service management processes
• IT service management: how ITIL and other best practices are implemented
• Lifecycle dashboards: tracking and controlling the whole of Orchestrated IT from a single user interface 

I look forward to hearing from and seeing you all again. Mark your calendar now for September 10^th – 12^th at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV. Register today.

The six steps are to synchronize people with processes, to systematize demand management, to automate repetitive tasks, to integrate people with system processes, to rally around an ops calendar, and to orchestrate service management. 

Together these steps make ops processes automated, transparent, configurable and connected.  In a word, ops will become orchestrated.  Orchestration creates dramatic improvements in cycle time, compliance, agility and accountability. 

The good news is that the responses suggested in the paper can and should be implemented step-wise, and they will leverage the tooling infrastructure already in place.

The result will be significant incremental gains, consistently achieved.  Such gains soon add up to a crushing competitive advantage.

That’s the benefit of Orchestrated Ops.

I hope the paper is helpful to IT Ops leaders whether or not they are Serena customers.  Let me know if it is helpful to you.

Get the whitepaper, “Orchestrated Operations Management.”

The traditional on-premise ERP service management vendors, like their ERP cousins, subscribe to the tenets of the ERP economic model:  high license and maintenance fees, implementation fees 2x-3x license fees, long and costly upgrades, hard to use and extremely rigid.  These on-premise ERP-like service management systems live by the ERP maxim, “once up and running…don’t touch”!   

So why do companies looking for an on-premise service management solution accept the ERP cost model?   Well for one reason, they don’t have much choice in the matter.  It’s either the classic on-premise ERP approach or the cloud…nothing in between.  While many companies have chucked their costly on-premise ERP service management system and moved to the cloud, still many others are looking for an affordable on-premise alternative.   A second reason is that companies have been buying enterprise software for 30 years and seemingly just accept high prices and complexity as part of the package.  So what to do? 

Serena, a finalist for the Pink Elephant ITSM Innovation Award, provides an affordable on-premise service management solution that is the antithesis of the on-premise ERP approach.  Serena’s on-premise service management solution can be bought and implemented in a 10^th of the time at a 10^th of the cost compared to traditional on-premise ERP-like service management solutions.  But how can this be? ERP-like systems were built over a 20 year period by many different development teams, using many different development tools and methodologies.  They’ve bolted on so many different technologies that the systems have taken on a Frankensteinian look to them.  This is why these systems, like their ERP cousins, are so costly, complex and hard to customize.      

With Serena’s affordable on-premise approach, we deliver business/IT service packs, all model developed, no programming, fully integrated with our powerful, agile business process platform.  Leveraging our Visio-like service modeling capability, customers can easily customize, add and extend the delivered Serena IT Ops service packs to satisfy their ever-changing requirements.    

When compared against 20-year-old, on-premise ERP like solutions, Serena Service Manager customers can be up and running in a matter of a few months vs. a year, upgrade their Serena solution in a week vs. months, and customize the delivered services functionality in a few days vs. several months.  This is why we can say that Serena’s service management system can be up and running in a 10^th of the time at a 10^th of the cost compared to on-premise ERP service management solutions.  For those customers who wish to move their business/ IT services to the cloud while still maintaining the ability to customize the delivered services…yup, we have an app for that!

Software is at the heart of high tech, while Silicon Valley is the most concentrated and vibrant tech region in the world. Thus Serena’s ranking as a Top 20 Silicon Valley software company speaks to Serena’s position as one of the most important tech companies in the world.

The Grand Prize winner received an iPad 2 and a $500 donation towards the charity of his choice, while the category winners received $50 gift cards and $250 donations to their favorite charities. 

…AND THE CHARITIES ARE:  

Grand Prize
Technology Category:
@Kaizeneer
Charity: “Dads Camp” The Indianapolis Church of Christ
The Dad’s Camp is comprised of local mothers and fathers who donate their time and effort to make a fun, spiritual and affordable church camp for boys.

Runner-up Winners
Holiday Category:
@JadenRuby
Charity: The Ronald McDonald House
The Ronald McDonald House program provides a “home-away-from-home” for families so they can stay close by their hospitalized child at little or no cost. The Houses are built on the simple idea that nothing else should matter when a family is focused on healing their child – not where they can afford to stay, where they will get their next meal or where they will lay their head at night to rest.

General Category:
@jodeepups  
Charity: Shana’s Last Chance Dog Rescue
Shana’s Last Chance Dog Rescue is dedicated to saving the lives of innocent animals that are homeless and scheduled to be euthanized.

Donating $1,000 to charity is always gratifying! 

The Twitter-based contest called for contestants to submit Plusisms for three categories: Technology, Holiday and General. Inspired by Serena’s very own Plusism of “People + Process = Business In Sync,” we saw a little bit of everything from the hilarious to the bizarre. 

…AND THE WINNERS AND WINNING SUBMISSIONS ARE:  

Grand Prize (iPad 2) and $500 to Charity of Choice
Technology Category:
@Kaizeneer
Poor Release Management + Frazzled Service Desk = Pain Management @Serena_Software #PlusIs

Runner-ups and Winners of the Cash Prizes and $250 Donations to Charity of Choice
Holiday Category:
@JadenRuby
NBA + Lockout = 7 Christmas Day Knockouts YEA! @Serena_Software #plusis

General Category:
@jodeepups 
Creative Tweets + @Serena_Software = A Win Win Situation for my Favorite Charity & me! #PlusIs

Winners were selected based on creativity, humor and relevance and announced via Twitter on January 20^th, 2012. Judges also verified that all submissions adhered to the published contest rules and guidelines. 

Thanks to the multitude of entrants and our judging panel for another great contest!

1. Agile grows up. 
   Agile development will no longer be defined by sprints alone. In 2012, Agile will move from a development practice into an extended business process. This leads forward-looking organizations to adopt more modern release management solutions that alleviate the agile bottleneck that still exists at the point of application.
2. Release management becomes a CIO priority. 
   As its importance to the software organization grows, release management will no longer report to the apps or ops teams. Always struggling to “serve two masters” – apps teams prioritize velocity while operations wants stability – release management actually serves the business and therefore will increasingly report directly to the CIO.
3. IT Service Management (ITSM) gets a facelift. 
   Innovative new approaches to service management will gain a foothold in the enterprise and challenge ERP-like ITSM providers. Mergers and acquisitions within the market will also add to the dynamic nature of the space this year.
4. Outsourcing becomes survival of the fittest. 
   New ways to measure outsourced IT performance shift the balance of power from the outsourcer to the CIO, encouraging competition for outsourced IT (highest performance at the lowest cost). New demand management systems help CIOs identify and predict high performers and outsource accordingly.
5. New DevOps teams emerge. 
   Executive leadership will push for more collaboration between application development and IT operations. This transition results in the formalization of DevOps, while also giving these teams a stronger leadership position within the IT organization (in ITIL, known as “Service Transitions” organizations).

These and related trends make an orchestrated approach to IT a new enterprise priority. While most software delivery organizations today have many of the right tools in place, the biggest challenge will be orchestrating these disparate elements toward gaining new efficiencies across all of IT.

At the Gartner AADI Summit in December 2011, we surveyed IT executives about their top application development and delivery priorities for the coming year and discovered some notable results.  68% of respondents confirmed that faster delivery of applications is the top priority.  Expanding the use of Agile and reducing application development costs were the second and third highest priorities, coming in at 52 percent and 49 percent respectively.

We found that delivering applications faster is also growing in importance, up almost ten percent from the 2010 survey.  Interestingly enough, performance has outpaced cost as a priority, according to the survey, as the reduction of application development costs dropped in importance in this year’s survey—replaced as the number two priority with Agile use.

While most software delivery teams today have the right tools, roles, and functions in place, we see the biggest challenge in finding a way for these elements to effectively work together from initial request to release into production, so the entire IT organization can be as efficient and cost effective as possible. By putting effective processes in place, even the largest global enterprises can better orchestrate, measure, predict, and accelerate the overall software delivery process.

See complete results from the survey in the graph below.

Creative Intellect Consulting (CIC), a prominent UK analyst firm, has written a “creative short” – a short paper filled with expert insights – on what leading IT organizations are doing to be truly agile across the entire enterprise. Learn how you can successfully extend agile from a core development focus to a standard that stakeholders across the entire application delivery lifecycle can embrace.  

Read the “12 Strategies for Delivering End-to-End Agility” to learn how to: 

• Focus on end-to-end IT processes to help all IT be more agile.
• Maintain governance and auditability without sacrificing agile benefits.
• Enable IT Operations to more easily manage the higher volume of agile sprints and releases.
• Overcome organizational and technological challenges with hybrid water-scrum-fall techniques.

• “The combination of better traceability reports offered by Dimensions CM and new reversible headers features will make the adoption of the CM platform from PVCS much easier.”
• “The performance numbers from Dimensions CM 12.2 look very promising.  Anything that is done to reduce the amount of time required to deliver changes translates directly into increased developer productivity and satisfaction with CM.”
• “The new expanded keywords in Dimensions CM 12.2 are critical for our teams. They provide parity with what our developers were used to in PVCS and allow our developers to be more consistent in the information that is delivered via the variables.”

I’m very proud of all the extensive enhancements that the Serena R&D team has done with CM 12.2. Here are just some of the key highlights:

• Parallel development enhancements to drive customer satisfaction
• Certified integrations, especially for systems development tools, to increase productivity for manufacturing customers
• PVCS-style support to facilitate PVCS → CM migration opportunities

In addition, significant work has been done on CM 12.2 to continue improving product performance, product quality and customer satisfaction. Here are just a few key metrics highlighting Serena’s attention to product quality:

• Almost 6x performance improvement in delivering files into a stream against a request
• Up to 45% improvement in scanning file work-area to calculate differences
• 20% more test cases compared to CM 12.1
• 17.5% customer backlog reduction
• 20.5% customer regression backlog reduction 

For more information on Dimensions CM 12.2, I encourage you to see the full release notes for all the details.

For those who attended the VUG, we would like to apologize for a couple of technical issues.  While the content that John provided was excellent, there were glitches in the execution due to both technical and human error.  We have learned from these mistakes and can assure you that they will not happen again.  Please accept our apologies. 

As promised, here are the questions that we did not get to, along with the answers: 

Q: ­Is there any work being done specifically related to CICS Web services; related to WSDLs and WSBIND files?­ 

A:  ZMF will treat those files like any other in the repository.  The Eclipse platform provides built-in editors for working with WSDL files.  As the WSBIND files are generated from a CICS utility, the ZMF build process that creates the WSBIND files (DFHWS2LS/DFHLS2WS) can be customized to store the files in ZMF.   

Q: ­Can you expand on editors that will be available?  I am interested in the Eclipse components in conjunction with Compuware Eclipse plugins and SlickEdit language intelligent editor.­ 

A: The various editors are part of the Eclipse platform.  Different editors may be installed/enabled from a variety of sources and vendors.  Serena has already assisted customers in running the ZMF4ECL plugin in the Compuware Workbench environment.  I would anticipate integrations with SlickEdit to work as well.   

Q: ­Is Serena planning to provide a build procedure for SQLJ Java Stored Procedures­? 

A: We don’t have one at this time.  This sounds like an excellent enhancement request. 

Q: ­Is there a facility to copy HFS files to multiple LPARs in a single system when installing a package in ZMF v7?­ 

A: This may be accomplished by customizing the ZMF install  SKELS at your site.  There are a number of ways to accomplish this depending on your environment/setup. 

Q: ­Is DB2 Connect supported with ZMF v7?­ 

A: Not at this time.  In the past, ChangeMan ZMF worked with DB2 Connect via a REXX interface into DSNTPSMP that IBM has since stopped supporting.  The equivalent to DSNTPSMP procedures supplied by IBM are modules without exit or integration  points, so there is currently no way to access this from ZMF.  A solution to this is currently being researched by the ZMF development team (ENH184950).

The #PlusIs contest is a chance to use Twitter + your imagination to get creative, have fun and win great prizes, such as an iPad 2 or a donation of $250 to the charity of your choice. Three category winners will receive $50 gift cards and the $250 charitable donations, and one Grand Prize winner earns the iPad 2. 

The contest will officially conclude on January 19, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. ET, so get your submissions in now for your chance to win. To be a part of this contest, write and submit a PlusIs about your favorite combination in the Information Technology, General or Tis the Season categories. All entries must be submitted via Twitter to @Serena_Software, and include the hash tag #PlusIs.  

Leading contenders (so far) include:

Russian protestors clash with police + ballot box “stuffing” = Dis-Putin @Serena_Software  #plusis

SBM + ARMY = ITIL in place @Serena_Software #PlusIs

Employees + Christmas Party = Gossip filled next day! @Serena_Software #PlusIs

Teenage Libido + Internet = Security Nightmare for you @Serena_Software #PlusIs  

Creative Tweets + Serena_Software = A Win Win Situation for my Favorite Charity & me! @Serena_Software #PlusIs

A panel of judges will select winners based on creativity, humor, relevance and frequency of submissions. The winner will be announced via Twitter on January 20, 2012. 

For official rules and prize information, please visit: www.serena.com/PlusIs

The questions came from all angles, probably ones that you’ve even asked like:

• What exactly does it mean for DevOps convergence to take place?
• Cloud and virtualization have muddied the DevOps waters even more. Can you explain where these two environments fit in?
• Where does automation technology fit into DevOps?
• Does adoption of ITIL v3 within the enterprise impact DevOps and co-existence?

The answer to the overall question of bridging the gap is yes.  Development and operations can work together, with the right mindset and processes in place.  Get all the insight and the solution by reading the article, “Q&A: Can Developers and Admins Co-exist and Improve the Enterprise?”

Please take just a few minutes to answer 20 questions on application delivery. If you’re the 100^th valid response, you’ll win an iPad!*  After the survey results are compiled, you’ll get a complimentary copy of the research report and be able to see how your IT organization’s practices compare to others. 

Fill out the Survey Now! 

*The 100^th valid response to the survey will win an iPad2. Serena Software will contact the respondent via the email address provided in the survey. A valid survey response must contain a full name, work email address and phone number. Multiple survey responses are not considered valid. Serena employees and partners are not eligible for the survey and iPad.

Now it’s your turn. The two-month-long PlusIs contest is a chance to use Twitter + your imagination to get creative, have fun and win great prizes, such as an iPad 2 and a $250 donation to the charity of your choice. Three category winners will receive $50 gift cards and $250 charitable donations to the charities of their choice. With three categories to submit for—technology, general and holiday—there is something for everyone in Serena Software’s PlusIs Twitter contest. 

Together we’re awarding $1,000 to the charities of the four winners’ choice! 

The contest will kick off on Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 12:01am ET and end January 19, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. ET. 

To be a part of this contest, write and submit a PlusIs about your favorite combination in the Information Technology, general or Tis the Season categories. All entries must be submitted via Twitter to @Serena_Software, and include the hash tag #PlusIs. 

For example: 

People + Process is Business In Sync. @Serena_Software #PlusIs
Rip + Replace is Expensive. @Serena_Software #PlusIs

Mistle + Toe is Kiss @Serena_Software #PlusIs
Turkey + Stuffing is Reason for a Nap @Serena_Software #PlusIs 

A panel of judges will select a winner based on creativity, humor, relevance and frequency of submissions. The winner will be announced via Twitter on January 20, 2012. 

For official rules and prize information, please visit: www.serena.com/PlusIs

Register Now! All attendees will receive our white paper, 8 Ways to Business Value with Release Management. 

Glenn and Serena experts will demonstrate and discuss how you can leverage revolutionary improvements in release management solutions to:

• Improve release visibility
• Increase release flow
• Reduce downtime
• Simplify compliance

Reserve your spot today.  Even if you can’t make the live event, registering now will ensure you are notified when the recording is available.

In the planning phase of version 6, and with the growing popularity of Web Services, we could no longer assume that requests coming into ZMF were simply from TSO users as in the past. With product integrations, web service calls embedded in application code,  and initiatives for Release Management and Orchestrated ALM, many requests were coming into ZMF and we needed to again address scalability. Along with a growing backlog of customer-driven enhancement requests that could only be achieved through major architectural changes, the time certainly arrived for the architectural overhaul of ZMF. 

Sernet was redesigned to better accommodate the volume and diverse types of requests coming into the system. With this redesign, we moved away from 32K chunking/chaining to a continuous data stream. Redundant and obsolete code that was more relevant in previous releases was removed, and particular focus was placed on scalability and error recovery. 

Impact Analysis (IA) was redesigned to reside in a data space and stored in a Linear Data Set when the task is down. Benefits of the redesign of IA :

1. To improve performance.
2. To expose XML/Web Service enablement to our customers.
3. To position for Java support (which came in v7).
4. To accommodate the new unlimited component history capabilities. 

Promotion was enhanced to accommodate renames and scratch requests; the addition of a promotion scheduler was added, too. 

Component Meta-data Rewrite/Expansion 

Customers, particularly in the financial sector, have the requirement of maintaining unlimited component history. Previously, only 24 levels of component history were maintained. With the arrival of each new version, the 24th was pushed off the stack.  ChangeMan ZMF Version 6 supports unlimited numbers of component history; it also accommodates variable length records and allows the storage of user meta data and/or parameters. 

Today, more application development is being done off the mainframe to reduce costs and because new developers prefer to work in the environment of their choice. ChangeMan ZMF supports a variety of these development environments.  For several years, Serena has offered ChangeMan zDD, which provides a Windows Explorer view and has worked very well for many of our customers. Other developers prefer to work in IDEs, such as Eclipse. We’ve provided WD4ZMF (WebSphere Developer for ZMF) and an Eclipse plugin allowing access into ZMF using WDz.  Most recently, we introduced the ChangeMan ZMF Client Pack, which combined zDD, an Eclipse plugin that allows for native Eclipse access to ZMF, and a plugin for IBM Rational Developer for z/OS (RDz) – the rebrand of WDz. 

Screenshot from the latest Eclipse plugin from ChangeMan ZMF v7

In addition to this support for off-platform development, Serena aligned with the trend to support the large increase in hybrid application deployments — use of Java, XML and Web Services.  This not only maintains its leading position with regard to managing legacy assets, but also provides ChangeMan ZMF governance for modern application development on the mainframe, including:

1. Full Java support tightly integrated into the product, including build, promotion, audit, and impact analysis.
2. Support of native file systems: HFS/zFS, which includes full support for 255-byte file names and 1024-byte path names within the product. This includes Development, Staging, Promotion and Baseline libraries.
3. PDS/PDSE is still supported as well for legacy components. This support was incorporated into not only zDD and Eclipse, but into ISPF and all service interfaces as well.  

While we have never expected ISPF to be the interface of choice with Java programmers, you never know.   So, all of the appropriate panels have zoom capabilities to show the full names (in accordance with ISPF standards). 

I mention this  because this is where the Evolution vs. Revolution discussion is important.  Support for the new trends of mainframe modernization (IDEs, deployment of hybrid applications, management of modern languages and file systems) built upon a quarter-century of stability, rigor and integrity. Like rings around a tree. 

The ChangeMan ZMF team has been busy!  We had 3 major product releases in the last 4 years with 9 maintenance releases across 3 versions.  It’s a continuous effort to balance investment in the existing feature set with addressing customer enhancements and aligning with the market — all while ensuring the future of ChangeMan ZMF.  

Thanks for all the feedback on my last post.  I still welcome your comments below!

Join in on a special customer webcast on Thursday, November 3 as QBE FIRST discusses the 5 key development metrics they use to effectively manage a complex distributed team of developers, QA professionals, business analysts and operations personnel. QBE FIRST will go through:

• Challenges the company faces as part of a regulated industry
• Key development processes and metrics, and
• Best practices for their distributed teams

As a bonus, Greg Harder of Serena R&D will show how the new Serena Lifecycle Dashboard provides IT organizations rapid insight into their end-to-end application delivery metrics and tools. See how you can use new dashboards to capture the key metrics you need – no matter what tools you use – and streamline development processes across all your distributed teams and tools.

Register for the webcast: Top 5 Development Metrics You Can’t Ignore on Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 8:00 am Pacific / 11:00 am Eastern/ 4:00 pm UK / 5:00 pm CET.

When it comes to agile in enterprise IT, the tension of speed versus control can seem impossible to resolve. However, some IT organizations have taken a process-based view to make the entire application delivery process more agile. They evaluate the process touch points between stakeholders across the entire lifecycle – from initial request to final release into production – to become truly agile. Orchestrating agility has helped IT organizations realize dramatic results, including 40% faster development, 50% lower costs, and 15X more releases.

How do they do it? Here are 4 steps to deliver agility across the entire IT organization, and not just within development.

1. Orchestrate Development to Deployment: IT organizations must not only coordinate development, operations and business – they need to automate this collaboration.
2. Develop with Agility: Development needs to more tightly integrate multiple disciplines and practices, multi-tier application development and global development teams, while taking advantage of virtualization and cloud computing.
3. Orchestrate Dev and Ops: Development needs to work more closely with Operations to meet the increasing velocity and volume of releases, while maintaining a closed-loop process with Service management to minimize the impact on data centers.
4. Orchestrate visibility and insight: IT is run as a business. So, IT organizations need unified visibility and insight from demand through development to release and ongoing service and maintenance.

To get more detail about these 4 steps and learn more about orchestrating agility across the entire application delivery lifecycle in your organization, attend my presentation at the ALM Expo, a virtual conference from November 9-10. Register – it’s free!

These enhancements, combined with everything done in ChangeMan ZMF v6, would make it easy to assume “revolution”. But let’s take a step back and trace the history of ZMF and how it has evolved over time.

Change Man vs. ChangeMan

In its earliest carnation, ZMF (which was then called Change Man) had many of the same constructs — the package orientation (which was pioneered by Serena) and a package lifecycle — so, in many ways it looked very similar from the outside. However, on the inside it was quite different. For starters, it was purely an ISPF-driven application. Hence, there was no started task, just ISPF users serializing on the VSAM package master, log and delay files while the physical artifacts were moved or copied as appropriate.

With Change Man gaining traction in the market and higher customer adoption, the product found that it was hitting the upper bounds of the workload it was capable of managing under the then-current design. In subsequent releases, the product ran as a started task where MVS facilities such as ECB lists, Cross Memory Services and the Subsystem Control Table (SSCT) allowed better coordination and multiple instances of the product, therefore allowing for higher concurrent usage while maintaining data integrity.

Then came Sernet, the underlying architecture which was introduced to facilitate all session, program, data and storage management, a subsystem interface, and a communications layer that allowed for cross-platform communication. As things moved forward, most of the heavy lifting done by the user (which in those days were TSO and batch) were beginning to get done on the server side. New features such as Remote Promote were added in addition to a new API set known as Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs). The RPCs allowed for an interface to ChangeMan outside of the usual ISPF interface, however, it was still a very data-driven API. It relied strictly on DSECTS and correct data mappings, so data structures had to map out accordingly.

Name Change to ‘ChangeMan ZMF’

With v5, ChangeMan ZMF emerged. The name, ‘Change Man,’ became ‘ChangeMan’ and ‘ZMF’ was added. In v5, most of the processing was moved from the client side to the server side. A new API set was introduced, which was then known as the Extended Services. Functions that previously existed in the ISPF programs were service enabled, which modularized the code base and allowed for code reuse. Extended Services were reworked into what is now known as the XML Services. No more sensitivity to offsets, record layouts and pairing of DSECTs to data structures. With XML’s extensibility, the user no longer needed to be concerned with offsets changing from release to release. The XML Services are the basis of what are now ChangeMan ZMF’s Web Services although the XML Services remain in use as well. Version 5 is also where ERO, LBO, cross-application support for auditing and IA and WD4ZMF were all introduced.

In my next post, I’ll go through the evolution of ChangeMan ZMF v6 and v7. Let me know what you think about ChangeMan ZMF and write a comment below!

Ultimate Software has thousands of servers and multiple deployments running daily from pre-production to production. At such a fast pace and high volume of application changes, it’s absolutely critical that they employ a streamlined process-approach to release automation. 

Previously, Ultimate Software was using Symantec Altiris but decided to evaluate other deployment solutions in search of one that could manage their complex applications, improve operational efficiencies and streamline the deployment process. Serena’s Release Automation solution addressed these criteria and is expected to reduce their application release deployment times and significantly decrease operational costs.

The tech company’s Director of Infrastructure and Deployment Strategy, Brian Goldberg, told us: “Following months of meticulous research, we identified Serena as the best application deployment solution on the market. We realized that existing infrastructure automation solutions, such as Altiris, can do a good job when you need to provision new servers, but when it comes to application releases and deployments, it’s a different story. We look forward to leveraging Serena’s Release Automation solution as our unified deployment solution and ensuring the highest level of security and reliability.”

Learn more about Serena Release Automation, powered by Nolio, which is a component of Serena’s end-to-end Release Management solution.

Some IT organizations have been turning to SaaS for IT management applications. Reasons driving the decision are the same ones behind the sales organization adopting SalesForce.com. Besides the cost and service-level standards, IT organizations are frustrated that the continuing complexity of legacy ITSM products means many of their features are underused and rarely modified after the long initial implementation. That underuse of features makes it easier for IT to accept that SaaS products are typically not as full-featured as the legacy brands. After all, why buy the super-sized meal if you can’t eat all of the small size?

But wouldn’t it make sense not to have to make a trade-off between easy deployment and a rich feature set? Why not first select the ITSM product that meets your needs and then determine the deployment model that makes the most sense? Every ITSM vendor should be able to offer the same functionality regardless of the deployment model. And you should be able to choose not just SaaS or on-premises but also a flexible hybrid that seamlessly combines these models – with your choice of capabilities hosted by the vendor and others still deployed on premises.  In other words, the deployment model shouldn’t be an issue in the selection of the solution. Instead, you should be able to deploy the solution you want in the way that makes sense for your organization.

To learn about how Serena Service Manager can be deployed anyway you want – SaaS, on-premises or a flexible hybrid, download Top 5 Reasons for Orchestrated Service Management or join us for an October 11th webinar on Transforming IT with Process-Based ITSM, featuring insight from Forrester’s Eveline Hubbert Oehrlich.

This customer wants a solution that’s more flexible and adaptable than what they have today, that can be modified on the fly by regular help-desk staff, and that can support their goal of measurably improving service to their users. They also want to be sure they don’t lose ground on key capabilities and are able to offer a better user experience and expanded self-service. And they want to avoid the arduous implementation process and high costs they went through with their legacy solution.

Another key topic they wanted to cover was the pros and cons of SaaS. As one director said, “If SaaS meets my capabilities and cost goals without sacrificing security and adaptability, I’ll go there. But I’m not convinced that I can get that mix.” Since some of the stakeholders were advocating SaaS, this director wanted to resolve this issue before we dove into a discussion of product capabilities.

Here are the main deployment-model topics this director wanted to compare for each deployment model:

• License cost
• Implementation cost and time
• Adaptation cost and time
• Security and control
• Service level and responsiveness guarantees
• Integration with related applications
• Solution features and product roadmap
• Visibility, reporting, metrics – and can these be easily customized and adapted?

I’d like to hear from you about these concerns around deployment models. Are yours similar? Got anything to add? What’s your most important issue in weighing options for ITSM deployment? What are you concerned about losing if you go the SaaS route?

In my next post, I’ll write more about Serena’s no-trade-off approach to deployment options, including a flexible deployment model that is a hybrid of SaaS and on-premises. Later I’ll compile your responses and other customer feedback and write a follow-up blog to share what your peers are thinking about IT deployment options.

The 100 percent Twitter based contest asked contestants to reveal their best or worst help desk experience in the form of a Haiku.  From the hilarious to the bizarre, we saw a little bit of everything. The judging panel had an extremely difficult time choosing a winner and therefore decided to not only award the grand prize winner with the iPad2, but award the runner-ups with cash prizes and honorable mentions. 

…AND THE WINNERS ARE: 

Grand Prize (iPad 2)
@Kaizeneer (See picture to the right.  Winner Dan Lafever, on the right, is pictured with Serena VP of Product Marketing Carl Landers at the FUSION 11 Conference.)
Help Desk horror flick:
rogue tech kills main router in:
“Silence of the LANS”

Honorable Mentions (cash prize)
@JadenRuby
Help desk sent a hunk
Man I didn’t get his name
Oh look, broke again!

@humor_q
Called from hospital
Help told me to pull the plug
Grandma almost died 

Winners were selected based on creativity, humor, and relevance and announced via Twitter. Judges also made sure all submissions adhered to the contest rules and guidelines. 

Thanks to the multitude of entrants and our judging panel for a great contest!

Well, the “Dev and Ops Divide” has just narrowed with the release of two breakthrough solutions: Serena Service Manager and Serena Release Manager.

Serena Service Manager provides an easily configurable and flexible process-based approach to delivering IT services, along with a unified service portal, and integrated service management dashboards.  The business user interface, Serena Request Center, gives end users one convenient view of all the services available to them and offers IT one funnel for routing requests.

Serena Release Manager dramatically speeds application delivery and introduces a new visual enterprise release calendar for both application development and IT operations.  Both solutions are fully integrated and build upon Serena’s Orchestrated Application Delivery product strategy, which emphasizes process and automation. 

Dev and Ops Divide.  What Dev and Ops divide?

Get more information about our new ITSM and ALM solutions.  On this page, you’ll find links to 2-minute demos, the full press release and an invitation to attend a webcast series on best practices for IT operations.

And for even more, tune into Serena’s YouTube channel.  Watch Serena experts demonstrating Serena Release Manager and Serena Service Manager.  Ben Cody, VP of Service Management Solutions, shares in detail the exciting features in Serena Service Manager.  Plus, you’ll see a video of me explaining why Orchestrated Application Delivery and Release Management are resonating so well with our customers.

Here’s what you can expect from the new solution:

• A Flexible, Process-Based Approach: Serena Service Manager provides customers service management processes that encapsulate ITIL best practices. Customers can graphically change these processes to match their unique way of addressing constantly changing business demands – without having to rely on an army of vendor consultants that drive up costs and create upgrade headaches down the road. Intuitive, easily configurable forms and screens result in a lower learning curve and improved agent productivity.
• Integrated Visibility: The new ITSM solution provides an integrated Configuration Management Database (CMDB), dashboards, ad-hoc reporting and audit trail, which provides greater control over infrastructure changes by delivering contextual information that speeds incident and problem investigation. 
• A Single, Friendly End User View: Serena Service Manager gives business users a single view of all the services available to them through a unified service request portal and service catalog called Serena Request Center.   It’s incredibly easy to use as well as administer.

Get a comprehensive view of Serena Service Manager and learn how it can help you combat your current ITSM challenges around flexibility, visibility, and usability inherent in legacy ITSM solutions.

xChange is well and truly back!

We started planning xChange 2011 in November 2010 and thousands of hours have gone in to making it such a success. A massive amount of credit goes to the xChange team led by Jen Melvin, Serenity Thompson, Shirley Miller, Vickie Schira, Kath McKeever and Renee Scullin whose tireless efforts delivered up one of the most intensive, content rich, solution focused and fun events I have ever seen.

Attendee reactions were positive, upbeat and excited with many customers ready to sign up for next year’s conference. We haven’t picked a location yet, but will soon, so let me have your suggestions for xChange 2012.

I estimate that the 95 hours of conference content over three days came from 20,000 hours of preparation over 10 months by more than 100 people.

To that list of 100+ Serena staff, partners and support organizations, and on behalf of a very happy customer base, I say a heartfelt ‘Thank you.”

The best of the best

Of course it was all great but for me the top five highlights were:

• John Nugent describing the new corporate vision of “Orchestrated Apps + Orchestrated Ops = Orchestrated IT”
• Ali Kheirolomoom and Steve Brodie demonstrating how the vision is now a reality
• The customer Rapid-Fire Comment Round with lively and interesting debate told with great humor and experience
• The packed breakout sessions, especially for the newly launched Serena Service Manager
• And the unforgettable Bella Electric Strings who got us off to a great start and rocked the house during the partner party

Magic Moments

There are always the unexpected magic moments in any conference and they came in surprising ways and surprising places at this year’s xChange.

A breathless customer sought me out after one session to tell me “I know exactly what to do when I get home: upgrade to SBM … that stuff is cool!”

The Serena Account Manager who told me that three of her customers had told her that they had got answers to problems they had been wresting with in the AnswerZone that more than paid for the their trip to Las Vegas.

The customer who told me that that after his presentation another customer came up to him and said “We use your service, we were thinking of moving off it. Now I know how you develop applications I am going to recommend we stick with you.”

The Serena “geek” who told me that she’d been demoing her solution constantly since early in the morning, had had a crowd 4-deep at lunchtime and 6-deep in the evening session and had not done the demo the same way twice because of all the questions she was getting.

The mainframe customer who told me that he only gets to go to one conference a year and he was so happy he chose xChange.

And most poignant of all: the wife of a customer who told me she had never seen her husband so animated about anything as when he came back from the first day’s sessions. She told me he was getting ready to retire: now he has a whole new list of fun things he wants to do and retirement is the last thing on his mind. She seemed relieved about that!

Where next?

If you were there: you know what a great event it was. If you weren’t: you won’t want to miss the next one.

xChange 2012 will most likely be in September but we have not chosen the venue. We need your help. Please comment on this blog with your ideas and your reasons for wanting your favorite city.

Today was all breakout sessions in each of the 6 tracks from 8:00 to 3:00 pm. This year the tracks were organized around our solution sets:

• The Orchestrated ALM track looked at all the solutions as part of the overall Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and included some great customer sessions featuring CVS and Carefirst who have gone a long way to full automating their development process.
• In the IT Service Management and Serena Business Manager track we showed off all the great new innovations in SBM and in Serena Service Manager. This was the most popular track by far with every session having more than 80 people in attendance. This was the liveliest track too with much interaction between the speakers and the audience. Good job we put them in the largest room!
• For those customers wanting to improve the front end of the lifecycle the Demand and Requirements Management track provided the latest information about Prototype Composer and Dimensions RM.
• The Development Management track is where we took a deep dive into the distributed solutions around software development and featured our flagship Dimensions CM and PVCS/Version Manager products. It was great to see about 10% of the customers at the conference were still using PVCS/VM in some way or other.
• And those customers facing the daunting challenge of deploying software had the Release Management track where we were able to showcase our Release Control, Release Vault and Release Automation solutions and hear from customers who were already implemented and having success like Nationwide Mutual Insurance.
• About a third of the customers present attended the Mainframe track to hear about what was happening to ChangeMan ZMF and were rewarded with Belgian chocolate from one of our partners are they are every year.

If you’d like to take a peek inside the conference: have a look at some of the photographs we’ve loaded on to Flickr.

We started off day 2 with the Serena Innovation Awards, or “The Douggies”. They were presented by our Founder Doug Troxel to those companies that had done something extraordinary with our solutions.

The Application Development Award went to Dale Clark of Carefirst for the end-to-end automation of their SDLC which included the integration of Clarity, Quality Center, Dimensions CM, ChangeMan ZMF, Systems Architect, SharePoint, PeopleSoft and Beeline.

The Release Management Award was given to Prakash Balakrishnan of Nationwide Mutual Insurance for the remarkable integration of their web-based business-policy management system with ChangeMan ZMF.

And the Process Automation Award was presented to Tony Mattravers of AgustaWestland for changing how spare parts were managed such that order confirmation times went from 6 weeks to 6 minutes.

Of course we heard from Doug a little about our Serena history and customers were really touched to see our founder still engaged.

Peter Sianchuk told the customers about the many ways we Ensure Customer Success from helping them develop a business case through Value Engineering, to our Services Organization with education and training offerings in the classroom and in the cloud, to the residency program and implementation and mentoring programs, to our Support Team’s extensive global coverage and rapid response times.

The most fun of the morning was the Rapid-Fire Customer Comment round where we had Dale Clark (Carefirst), Sheila Stephens (QBE FIRST) and Ken Vane (Navy Federal Credit Union) answer tough industry questions posed by David Hurwitz. They each had “Fact” or “Fiction” paddles and voted on questions such as “Release Management should be its own department and not report into Apps or Ops: fact or fiction?” or “More money can be saved by automating deployment than automating testing: fact or fiction?” The answers were lively, thought provoking and often very funny. The audience loved the interaction and were cheering for their favorite answers. Best answer of the sessions went to Sheila in response to “Getting Apps and Ops to collaborate is easy: fact or fiction?”, her answer, one word “Chocolate!”

And the last session of the day was an open forum for customers to ask the Serena Executive Team anything that came to mind. And ask they did with questions about licensing, stability of the company, commitment to our current path and product direction.

In the evening we had an event at Studio 54 with music from the 70’s and 80’s and we had guest celebrities attend including Andy Warhol (played by Carl Landers), John Travolta (played by Patrick Merritt) and the Village People (played to synchronized perfection by the Field Marketing team of Serenity Thompson, LeeAna Valkovschi, Marina Selepouchin and Jasmine Hakki).

John got us off to a roaring start with the Serena Vision and Direction and brought all the customers up to date with the latest developments. He introduced us all to the easy to understand and easy tell message:

Orchestrated Apps + Orchestrated Ops = Orchestrated IT

He spoke about customer successes and convinced the crowd that we are back to the core businesses that make us so successful.

The “Serena Players” took us through the End-to-End Demo and customers were very visibly impressed. We showed the Request Center and the Dashboards and the integrations amongst the solutions and the crowd was on the edge of their seats. At the break the demo booths were packed with customers wanting to get their hands on the latest solutions and ask questions.

The morning highlight for many was Roadmap and Vision Sessions delivered by Steve Brodie and Ali Kheirolomoom showing the directions the solutions are taking. They both received rapturous applause for the path they are taking us on.

And David Hurwitz rounded out the morning with interviews of Peter Rizzo of Interactive Data and Quinn Lanus of Sungard talk about their experiences of their current Service Management solutions and why these chose to move to Serena Service Manager.

The afternoon was full of in depth breakout sessions with one TeamTrack customer telling me “I know exactly what I am going to do when I get back: I’m upgrading to SBM … that stuff is so cool!”

And if you talk to anyone who attended the conference they will certainly remember the string quartet, Bella Electric Strings, who opened the show with acoustic Light Classical and rocked the partner party with Electric Pop. Check out their YouTube video.

End-to-end breakouts make up today’s final day schedule, some three dozen sessions in all.  Most attendees will then head home, while many will stay for the intensive training sessions occurring here the rest of the week.

Unfortunately I have to jet off to Boston today for the Forrester Application Development & Delivery Forum tomorrow and Friday.  While I’m looking forward to learning a lot there, I’m sad to leave xChange early.

But I fly off knowing that xChange is well and truly back, and so is Serena.

The good feelings were evident last evening in the Solutions Showcase.  With the ever delightful Bella Electric rocking out in the middle of the joint, a dozen demo stations were humming around the perimeter.  I guess this proves that IT types get inspired by both great software and great music.

The great ideas came fast and furious.  For instance, a Six Sigma Black Belt informed me last night “My biggest epiphany today was…”, going on to describe how he could use the new Serena Request Center to bring his thousands of business users into revenue generating workflows.  Come to think of it, I never got around to asking him what his other epiphanies of the day were.

This morning was devoted to customers.  But first Doug Troxel transfixed the audience telling Serena’s founding story.  Everybody loves Doug.  (Hey, that could be the title of our next demo skit!)

Then he and maestro Kevin Parker gave out the Serena Innovation Awards to three very deserving customers: Carefirst, Nationwide and AgustaWestland.  Their stories were inspiring.

I then led a fun and surprising Fact or Fiction roundtable with Dale Clark of Carefirst, Sheila Stephens of QBE First and Ken Vane of Navy Federal Credit Union.  These three good humored and extremely wise IT leaders responded to a series of ten provocative statements by declaring each as Fact or Fiction and then explaining their answer.  The results were insightful.

All of the above took place in the first two hours.  The next six hours included countless breakout sessions.

Tonight is the xTravaganza party at Studio 54.  Wonder what’s going to happen there?

Instead we had well over 300 people packing a large room at the brand new MGM Grand convention center in Las Vegas.  Customers came from all over Europe, Latin America, Asia and North America.

The day began in beautiful fashion, with the four beauties of Bella Electric strings playing beautiful concertos while attired in long black concert dresses.  xChange Maestro Kevin Parker then orchestrated the assembled throng into humming the five note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  This summoned Bella Electric back on stage, this time in their Vegas outfits and playing their hot set.  Michael Jackson, Journey and even Led Zeppelin sound great when performed by four electric string musicians.

John Nugent, Serena’s President and CEO, then described a powerful vision for Orchestrated IT, talking in detail about several Serena customers who are already reaping the benefits.

Then some fun: a skit entitled “Doug Serena, CIO.”  This day in the life production used a case study of modern IT challenges and showed how Serena’s ability to orchestrate application delivery and IT operations can go a long way to solving them.  (Hint: I played Doug Serena.  So now I can say that while I’m not a real CIO, I once played one in front of almost 1,000 people, the total who were in the room and watching the live webcast.)

All of the above came in the first 90 minutes!  After the break, we delved into the substance of our vision and roadmaps for dev and ops, and took time to invite a couple of customers on stage.

Great morning.  More later…

As explained by Dr. Dobb’s Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Erickson,
“Dr. Dobb’s Jolt Awards recognize the most innovative, trend-making, ahead-of-the-curve products in software development. From mobile phones to massive data centers, open source or proprietary, Jolt Award winners represent the products, books and technologies that “jolt” the industry with their significance.”

Winners will be announced in October and selected by a panel of software development experts, such as industry writers from Dr. Dobb’s and other leading application development outlets, analysts and other industry pundits. Serena is proud to have “Jolted” industry gurus and be named to this prestigious list!

Our discussion included topics that are relevant to any organization that is exploring alternatives to the traditional big and cumbersome ITSM vendors: costs, flexibility, visibility, usability, and satisfaction.

What are your main issues with your legacy ITSM solution?

One thing that was very important to this customer was improving self-service, which they see as one key way to reduce costs and increase user satisfaction. They want to consolidate various online business services so users have a single service desk where they can explore, submit and track issues and requests. We talked about the role of process automation in realizing this vision. Oh, and cost. They want to be able to implement and frequently adapt this unified service fulfillment desk while spending and waiting less than they do today. That imperative means that each of the criteria listed above is urgent and important to them.

I’d like to hear from you about your most pressing issues, so please add your comments.

Key attributes of this model include:

• Process-based: Today’s Service Desk should include significant process automation – not just basic tasks like approvals, but connecting human and system tasks throughout request fulfillment, spanning IT and business areas such as Finance or HR.
• Insight and transparency:  IT staff, line-of-business owners and users all need role-based visibility.
• Easy to measure and adapt: You need good metrics and simple methods for adapting to change.

To achieve this vision, I recommend starting with a self-assessment. Here are some questions that can help you examine your current state.

If your answers are not overwhelmingly yes, then you are ready to investigate and evaluate a new approach to ITSM. Do you have comments or additional assessment questions to add?

IDC has identified the drivers for enabling business agility with release management improvements, including the following requirements: 

• A consistent repository as a single source of truth to help application deployments and to retain essential governance across software releases.
• Managing the release process with notifications and visibility into audit from requirements to deployment.
• Appropriate workflow and transition from development to deployment to manage a challenging handoff. 

The cost of a poorly coordinated release varies within each company but the impact is the same.  I know of one company that was unsure about which changes needed to go into release and what was being fixed specifically by the software update. When rollbacks needed to occur due to problems with the software release, they were time-consuming and challenging. Release problems occurred as frequently as two to three times per month.

Without automation, the manual process of reconciliation compounded the challenges. The company didn’t have tight control over the release process prior to bringing in automation — releases occurred in an ad hoc fashion, and the chance for things to go wrong was much higher as a result. Manual processes don’t enable confidence. As a result, I have heard on more than one occasion the cry of “Fix It Now!” from executive management fed up with the negative impact to their business. 

The requirement to contain long-term high costs in a volatile economy also remains problematic and can constrain business competitiveness and stifle growth and innovations when not proactively addressed and governed.  To drive release agility in your organization and learn three tips for improving release management strategies, read the paper Automate to Thrive: Driving Business Agility with Effective Release Management.

Serena is kicking off a Twitter Help Desk Haiku Poem Contest to capture these experiences in verse.

We want you to tap into your creative side for a chance to win an iPad 2 and hear your most horrendous or utopian help desk stories in the form of a Haiku poem. The contest will kick off on Tuesday, August 23, 2011 and end on September 26, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

To enter, write and submit a Haiku poem (17 syllables total with three lines of 5-7-5 syllables) on a help desk experience. Each line of the Haiku should be separated by a period, comma or slash. All entries must be submitted via Twitter to @Serena_Software, and include the hash tag #HelpDeskHaiku.

A panel of judges will select a winner based on creativity, humor and relevance. The winner will be announced at Fusion 11 hosted by itSMF and via Twitter on September 27th, 2011.

For official rules and prize information, please visit: www.serena.com/helpdeskhaiku

1. Exploit the real requirements lifecycle: when looking at improving requirements, you should look at the entire requirements process – from initial request to release into production.
2. Define and manage requirements collaboratively: your entire team needs to collaborate and focus on requirements quality – and that doesn’t mean testing.
3. Increase your use of pictorial artifacts: you should use pictures to help drive better understanding of requirements.
4. Establish a program of requirements reuse: reuse is critical to achieve economy of scale, especially across related products, applications and platforms.
5. Take an adaptive, process-driven approach: tools alone won’t help you deliver better requirements – you need to think about people and process too.
6. Measure and continuously improve: continuously measure business, project and end user metrics to determine if you’re really delivering quality requirements.

If you’re looking for expert advice on improving the quality of your products through good requirements practices, I highly encourage you to listen to our entire discussion on requirements management.

One important way for IT to deliver great customer experience is to provide a satisfying environment for users to resolve problems and ask for service. Enabling powerful user self-service requires more than providing tickets and forms for users to submit to the Help Desk. To maximize user autonomy when solving issues and making requests – and to reduce costs and repetitious tasks for Service Desk staff – IT needs to offer users: 

• An intuitive user interface that guides them through options and steps.
• Automated, simple-to-follow procedures for common tasks that you want users to be able to perform on their own.
• Access to knowledge needed to solve problems.
• Transparency and updates throughout a process so expectations are set.
• Options for requesting help when needed.
• Ability to suggest enhancements and track the fate of the submission.

Where is your IT organization in user self-service maturity? Keep an eye on this space for a questionnaire to help you assess your user self-service capabilities.

For much of them, the driver is not simply the replacement of one tool with another, but the increasing need to accommodate modern development practices, to more efficiently leverage globally distributed teams, and to simplify complex processes and technologies across the application development lifecycle, while leveraging some of their existing investments.

Then last week at a Customer Advisory Board meeting I heard, on multiple occasions, an organization’s desire to seek an alternative practitioner tool – requirements management or quality assurance tool, while maintaining an orchestrated product development process that enables rather than penalizes an evolution of individual practitioner tools.

And in terms of visibility, customers are seeing the value in an orchestrated ALM dashboard that can capture data from one or more practitioner tools, displaying both data and process KPI metrics.

I sense an increasing realization by our customers and prospects that ALM is becoming an instance of the practice of business process management, through which software delivery is automated through common workflows and practitioner tools -implementing methods, activities and change management in an orchestrated flow of software development and delivery.

That is what we’ve been focused on here at Serena, of course. If you’ll forgive me for pointing to some marketing material, we’ve encapsulated our view in the following presentation. Let me know what you think.

Watch Serena’s App Vision presentation: Orchestration & Visibility Across Teams, Processes & Tools.

KP: Thank you George for taking the time to talk to me. I know the mainframe track is one of the most popular each year. What’s exciting for 2011?

GP: Innovation in the products has continued at a blistering pace this year. We are going to show how ChangeMan ZMF fits into the Orchestrated ALM story, and how it actually leads the story.

KP: That is a bold claim, why is that?

GP: Simple: the ChangeMan ZMF ERO (Enterprise Release Option) is on fire! Customers all over the world are adding this option so they can coordinate their releases. Release complexity and the need for a solution that scales have never been greater.  Plus, customers will learn to use the power of ChangeMan ZMF Web Services to integrate mainframe SCM into development and release management processes.

KP: It sounds like you’re going to take these sessions deep.

GP: The REXX and XML Services are powerful and productive utilities. One of our partners will walk through the most commonly used ChangeMan ZMF customizations.

KP: And what about more routine updates?

GP: We’ve changed a lot of the internal file structures for ChangeMan ZMF. So, we will show why and what you get from that update. Plus, we’ll feature how one customer is using the new and improved INFO/MAN Option for ChangeMan ZMF and the HTTP SOAP Call System interface.

KP: What surprises are in store?

GP: Did you know that you can now put your Java apps under ChangeMan ZMF? And our Professional Services group is the best way to prepare your organization, your systems, and most importantly, yourself for the next upgrade.

KP: But we’re not just talking about ChangeMan ZMF I assume?

GP: Absolutely not.  You must come and see how ChangeMan SSM can protect your system infrastructure. We’re going to blow you away with how the new Dimensions for z/OS extends Dimensions CM’s reputation to the mainframe, delivering a consistent user experience across distributed and mainframe platforms.

KP: That’s quite a list. Anything more?

GP: Of course we’ve got sessions for all the mainframe products but the one I am most eager to see is the StarTool IOO where we will see dramatic performance improvements in the VSAM file system without changing any code!

KP: Sounds like you’ve done it again. Thanks George.

Register for xChange and take home a free Kindle! See you in Vegas.

Interesting question. Many of our customers report that application-centric deployments into pre-production and production environments are largely manual and script driven, with much dependence and reliance on the few resources currently tasked with defining and executing deployment tasks and activities. There comes a point with deployment when rewarding the fireman becomes akin to rewarding the arsonist, only they’re one and the same and the only resource who knows it, sees it, and can do something about it.

In a recent separate call with a customer, I met with two release analysts, a DBA, a resource responsible for middleware, and the release and production control manager. We learnt of 12 application types, 8 of which are web-based applications using WebLogic and Tomcat, and a backend Oracle SQL database. The customer reported an increase in application deployment requests to 60 per month, and has an average application deployment time of 38 minutes. The release analysts spend all their time creating and maintaining deployment scripts, managing the coordination of manual tasks and activities with DBAs and IT infrastructure and executing the deployments in pre-production and production environments. They both report an ever-increasing backlog of release planning and business priorities that currently remain undone. The release window is shrinking and the volume and velocity of deployment requests simply do not fit. Moreover, there is a high dependency on the release analysts and DBAs as they are working around the clock, becoming dangerously close to burning out.

We should reward where it makes sense, but we also need to ensure we optimize our release processes and practices. And I now know of two release analysts who would welcome their weekends back.

For more information about release automation, get the whitepaper Automate to Thrive: Driving Business Agility with Effective Release Management.

KP: I know you are a strong advocate of the importance of the requirements phase. What is your philosophy?

CC: Great software is driven by quality requirements. In other words, how well you deliver releases is highly dependent on how well you capture demand, mock up prototypes, and develop requirements.

KP: How have you made that part of the xChange track content this year?

CC: We have ensured that the Demand and Requirements xChange track will focus on how IT and product development organizations use Serena’s Demand Management products to capture, define and deliver on customer needs. We show real-world customer examples, best practices, product updates and we have intense technical sessions focused on Serena Demand Management products, including Dimensions RM, Prototype Composer, Agile Planner, SBM and PPM.

KP: I know you are excited about some of the customer presentations we have this year. What can you tell me about them?

CC: It is all about best practices. Our customers are in the real world and have deadlines, budgets and compliance needs to meet. Their best practices are far more effective. So, for example we are going to hear from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which is using Dimensions RM and SBM to ensure their releases meet their customers’ exact requirements for precision-made treasury certificates and security documents.

KP: I hear a lot about agile requirements. Are you going to talk about that?

CC: Good question. Our customers are navigating the dichotomy of agile/waterfall and not just that but also the ever more important intersection between hardware/software requirements to deliver quality products and applications, such as those in cars and phones and medical devices. So we are very excited to be able to announce some interesting and related developments from Serena’s product experts as they reveal what’s next for Serena’s Demand Management products.

KP: Intriguing, Chris. Thank you for sharing that. I am eager to see and hear what you have in store for us all.

Register for xChange now and receive a free Kindle loaded with the conference proceeding

SSM is built on top of Serena Business Manager (SBM).  Therefore, SSM inherits the ease-of-use, time-to-value, and custom fit capability of SBM.  Customers no longer have to tolerate the complexity, rigidity, and on-going operational and professional services costs associated with current ERP-like service management solutions.  SSM allows you to enjoy a time-to-value and TCO model that can’t be matched by traditional ERP-like service management systems.  This is why we can say that Serena can be implemented, modified, and extended to your existing in-house systems in a 10^th of the time and at a 10^th of the cost compared to traditional ERP-like service management systems.

Serena Service Manger can operate in our cloud, your cloud, hybrid cloud or on-premise.  SSM can be custom fitted to your needs in all these environments, fully supported by Serena.  Traditional cloud-based offerings ascribe to the “one-size-fits-all” model for use on their cloud.  Serena Service Manager offers a custom fit solution, in all environments, while providing the necessary integration to existing ALM tools and business applications behind your firewall.   This can all be performed in a 10^th of the time at a 10^th of the cost compared to traditional one-size-fits-all solutions.

Learn how SSM can benefit your organization by registering for the July 27 webcast, Top 5 Ways to Boost End User Satisfaction with IT: A Live Demo of Serena Service Manager.  I hope to meet many of you at xChange 2011, our upcoming Serena User Conference in September!

KP: So, our last poll indicates that more than 60% of those registered for the conference want to know what’s new and exciting with SBM. What do you have in store for them?

AA: We’re thrilled about all the interest in SBM! Our customers have quickly recognized that they can leverage the power of SBM to automate processes well beyond the application and product development realm – to streamline IT service management (ITSM) processes as well as those that support their core business operations. So we’ve packed our “SBM and IT Process Automation” track with sessions led by their peers and our product experts that will focus on how to get the most out of their SBM investments – best practices, product deep dives, and a slew of case studies.

We will also showcase the newest release of Serena Service Manager, our SBM-powered solution for IT Service Management (ITSM).

KP: Why the focus on ITSM and what can our customers expect to take away from the sessions on Serena Service Manager?

AA: We polled our customer base and found that 300+ customers use SBM to automate ITSM processes today. Another 1/3 of our base has been clamoring for an alternative to complex packaged ITSM solutions of old from the likes of BMC, CA and HP that are unintuitive and expensive to use and maintain and the “my way or the highway” SaaS offerings for ITSM that are out there. Since Serena Service Manager is powered by SBM, it has all the right ingredients to alleviate those challenges around flexibility, visibility and usability. And you can automate other core IT processes with the same solution.  Whether a customer is considering extending or replacing their ITSM capabilities, the sessions that we have lined up will be of value.

KP: I see that there are a lot of customer-led sessions. Which ones are you looking forward to?

AA: Without a doubt, WebMD and Worthington Industries.  They will talk about why they focused on a process-based approach to ITSM – from incident, problem, and change management right through to release management. Also, I wouldn’t miss AgustaWestland, the helicopter manufacturer.   They used SBM to reduce customer service request response times from 6 weeks to 6 minutes. And CareerBuilder is going to speak about uniting the power of SBM with existing investments in SharePoint – a “don’t miss” for customers that use SharePoint as their document store and portal.

KP: Thanks, Amita.  Going to be a great track.

Register for xChange 2011 now and take home a Kindle!

During the “Ask the Experts” session at the Serena Mainframe Virtual User Group meeting earlier this month, a few questions about the newest version of ChangeMan ZMF went unanswered due to the lack of time.  Mark Levy, Serena Software Mainframe product manager, and I went through them and provide the answers here.

Q: For ChangeMan ZMF v6, the product moved from DB2 to linear VSAM.  What are the benefits and risks that you have seen? 

A: In ChangeMan ZMF v6, the Impact Analysis function was moved from being based on DB2 to a z/OS data space, backed by linear VSAM. This was done for several reasons: performance, ability to better manage Java components, and the ability to expose Impact Analysis XML services, which could not be done under the DB2 implementation. In doing so, we have provided a utility which will allow users to offload this data back into a DB2 table in case they have SQL that they would like to continue to run against this data. This move eliminates the requirement for DB2 for dynamic IA updates. Now everyone has the benefit of real-time updates to their Impact Analysis data, even if they do not have DB2. 

Q: Is there a plan to manage data through ChangeMan ZMF also? 

A: ChangeMan ZMF has the ability to manage data components throughout the lifecycle, assuming that these are components that do not get built, compiled, have external dependencies that would require audit or impact analysis.  However, ZMF is primarily used for managing objects that relate to code (src, load, JCL, DBRM etc.) 

Q: Is the Eclipse plug-in part of ChangeMan ZMF? 

A: The Eclipse plug-in is an option that is part of the ChangeMan ZMF Client Pack, which also includes an Eclipse Plugin for Rational Developer and ChangeMan ZDD. 

Q: What exactly is in ChangeMan HANA? What are the exciting features? 

A: HANA is the code name for the next major release of ChangeMan ZMF.  The proposed features are still in the early stages of research. 

Q: Are you going to integrate PeopleSoft systems? 

A: There are no current plans for a PeopleSoft implementation at this time. With ChangeMan ZMF’s web and XML services, customers or Serena Professional Services have the ability to do these types of integrations. 

Q: What platforms will ChangeMan ZMF support for managing and deploying WebSphere?

A: ChangeMan ZMF will support the deployment of WebSphere applications and components on z/OS.

If you have additional questions, feel free to post a comment below or visit the ChangeMan ZMF page.

I just met with Steven Cronin from our German support team about the Release Management track at Serena’s annual user conference, xChange 2011, from September 19-21 in Las Vegas.  Steven is leading a worldwide team of Serena experts who have built the Release Management conference agenda.

KP: Who should attend this track?

SC: Anyone interested in or responsible for deployment and release management.

KP: Tell me about some of the highlights.

SC: We have one customer who will talk about the benefits they’ve gained from our release management solutions, like achieving a 90% reduction in deployment time. Some of our leading consultants and product managers will present on how release management can be utilized with your existing Serena products, including Version Manager, SBM, Dimensions CM and our Mainframe products.

KP: Which is the one session you are most excited about?

SC: In one session we are going to show how to deploy and manage releases with the click of a button in our Release Automation and Orchestration sessions. I’m also excited about showing the exciting new deployment features of Dimensions CM 12. They are going to be a huge benefit to our customers.

KP: You know I’ve challenged you to come up with at least one idea that customers can implement which will pay for the cost of the conference.  How will you be able to accomplish that during the Release Management session?

SC: Serena will share best practices for deploying applications across multiple platforms and provide examples on how to use Dimensions CM to implement continuous builds with integration frameworks such as Hudson and CruiseControl.  Also, we will show how to extend and customize the Release Management process by using pre- and post-deployment scripts.  Finally, we will share the many customer successes in using application-centric release automation.

KP: Are there going to be any announcements we should be eager to hear?

SC: We will introduce our new Serena Release Manager solution, which is an integrated solution addressing the release management needs of all stakeholders.

KP: Thank you Steven, and thanks to your whole team. There is something for everyone in this track and we look forward to welcoming customers to these exciting sessions.

Learn more about the Release Management Track at xChange 2011.  Then, register to attend!

KP: This is a pretty big track; it covers the entire lifecycle from demand to development to deployment. How did it come into being?

AO: While most customers have been using various Serena products to manage specific application development and deployment processes, many have also integrated multiple Serena solutions with third-party products to automate and orchestrate their entire application lifecycle process. We call this “Orchestrated Application Lifecycle Management” or Orchestrated ALM.

KP: What areas are you focusing on in the track?

AO: This year at xChange we have a concentration on real-world customer case studies and best practices and, from the product teams, updates and technical sessions focused solely on Orchestrated ALM. Everyone who attends will hear how customers are using combinations of Dimensions CM, Dimensions RM, HP Quality Center, SBM and other products to orchestrate their ALM processes.

KP: Clearly, this is a huge landscape to cover. How will customers be able to put all of this in context?

AO: The sessions on the Orchestrated ALM Reference Architecture, the blueprint for Serena’s future solutions, provide recommended best practices on how to integrate our products. You can hear from customers, like Carefirst, who have integrated SBM and Dimensions CM in a multi-methodology environment to provide complete software change and release management across the SDLC and into production.

KP: I am glad to hear there are so many sessions that customers will deliver. What is the one you are most interested to hear?

AO: CVS Caremark. They are saving time without sacrificing control and traceability for their complex application development ecosystem. There will be some amazing insights in this session.

KP: Thanks, Ash. Going to be a great track.

See detailed track and session descriptions for the Orchestrating the Entire Lifecycle track.  And to register click here.

We’ll see you in Vegas.

Over the last six weeks the product teams have been working through the submissions and their task has been very difficult. So many excellent presentations and so few speaking slots. Indeed we have actually opened up additional space to accommodate more of the ideas.

This week the top 80 suggestions went online and you can now review them on the xChange web site. Here are the links to the individual tracks:

• Orchestrating the Entire Application Lifecycle
• Demand and Requirements Management
• Development Management
• Release Management
• SBM and IT Process Automation
• Mainframe

Record breaking: Over 22 of the 83 sessions are customer presentations, again another Serena xChange record.

This year the content is more intense and in-depth than ever with customer, partner and Serena experts leading critical sessions that address some of the most advanced demand and requirements management, software development, release management, service management and process automation issues in the world today.

Keep an eye on the blog for more exciting announcements in the next week.

See you in Vegas in September!

Register now.

Our relationship with Nolio is a timely one, as the Release Management market is growing 35 percent annually. At the same time, IT environments are becoming increasingly complex with multiple platforms and n-tier applications; all of which have growing interdependencies. In order to release and deploy new capabilities into these complex environments, large-scale updates to multiple systems and integrated software releases are critical. This requires considerable coordination and orchestration to minimize the impact to production, delivery schedules, quality imperatives, and compliance mandates. Automating release management addresses these challenges and delivers dramatic boosts to an organization’s competitive edge.

We are thrilled to offer our customers a way to implement a true process that improves visibility and alignment across business, IT and application development—and proud to be the first company to offer release automation as part of an end-to-end ALM suite.

Learn more about Serena’s OEM agreement with Nolio.

Why does Office continue to lure organizations?

• It’s “free”: everyone already has a license on their computer.
• Easy to use: everyone knows how to use Excel and Word.
• Extreme flexibility: it’s easy to capture exactly what you want, how you want it with PowerPoint and Visio.

But those strengths are also Office’s biggest problems. Here are just some of the dangers with the Microsoft siren song:

• It’s not really “free”: I’ve conducted many workshops where companies showed me how Office wasted millions in rework, communication errors, and delays.
• Ad hoc communication: Communicating requirements is often done via email or SharePoint, and the lack of process often results in wasted workforce productivity.
• The impact of change: if a customer changes a requirement, how do you communicate that change to all impacted projects?
• Reinventing the wheel: it’s so hard to find something buried in thousands of Word and Excel documents, so it’s easier to just reinvent instead of reuse.

I continually preach against this insanity that circumvents the basics of a good requirements process, and I’ll continue doing so. If I do it enough, I hope one day that unsuspecting IT organizations will no longer be lured by the call of Microsoft Office’s requirements mediocrity.

John Carrillo is a thought leader in requirements management and application lifecycle management, with over 20 years experience in the commercial software and manufacturing industries. In his current role at Serena Software, he provides strategic counsel to organizations regarding technologies, process, and best practices for application. development and delivery.

1. Integrate existing lifecycle tool investments within an automated SDLC. You need to have a standard development process that helps you understand what’s going on. But it also needs to be flexible enough to have localized processes and different tools “plug in” so you have complete app vision.
2. Automate a lifecycle process with practitioner tool flexibility.  Don’t be coerced to change your processes and systems to fit a single vendor’s toolset. You should be able to get app vision with the tools, processes, and platforms that you want.
3. Create total clarity with process metrics such as cycle time and duration, in addition to data metrics.   App vision is more than development data like the number of defects or baselines. You also need visibility into process metrics, like cycle times and lag times between development phases.
4. Ensure role-based accessibility to relevant information at the right time.  You have to serve relevant information to the right people. You have to give them app vision when they need it. You can’t expect them to dig around a data warehouse to find the right information.
5. Empower the team and contributors; think beyond specific tools. Serena’s Orchestrated ALM Dashboard  is just one example of a solution that goes beyond specific tools. It gives you app vision into both the development data and process metrics across all your tools.

While releasing applications into production environments is a critical part of application development, we believe customer success is not just about speed alone. Success also means being able to provide a straightforward and secure path to production. Enter Dimensions CM.

Role-based security in Serena Dimensions CM helps you work more easily with outsourced development teams.

The technology provides a repeatable, reliable release management process that saves companies time and money, provides a high degree of visibility and also lets tools play “nice” with others. Dimensions CM integrates with many popular application lifecycle tools straight out of the box, including IDEs such as .NET and Eclipse, defect tracking, build, test management tools and help desks. Product enhancements in the new version enable Dimensions CM users to provide a gold repository for all release-ready code, which is especially critical for IT organizations that have multiple development tools in use by various development teams.

New features and capabilities in Dimension CM version 12 include:

• New Deployment View to provide a centralized console for release managers to view, execute and schedule deployments and rollbacks;
• Greater granularity and flexibility in managing promotions and deployments, demotions and rollbacks, simplifying role-based security and separations of concerns;
• Enhanced capabilities allowing customers to promote and deploy at a later date, enabling alignment with resource availability.

View more information on the latest version of Serena Dimensions CM.

This inevitably led to a white board where he proceeded to sketch their release process and draw attention to a number of their challenges.  I listened intently as I’m a firm believer in the principle that prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.  We quickly agreed on what appeared to be all too familiar problems:

• The increasing volume and velocity of application releases.
• The translation of development scripts and guidelines into deployment tasks and activities for pre-production and production.
• The manual sequencing of these tasks and activities across application tiers and infrastructure environments.

The following day I was invited to visit the Delivery Manager at the insurance company location. Sadly, it was announced that an application outage had occurred shortly before we arrived, and while we continued to understand the complexity and extent of their release processes and activities, it became apparent quickly that a DBA operation had been incorrectly applied, before the application was deployed. Troubleshooting an issue through a variety of largely manual deployment scripts is hard without an automated audit trail, and worse still, the automated backup recovery had failed to work also, thus causing a longer outage than would have been the case.

Their problem essentially became ours to help resolve.  And now together we are working to automate their release management process, simplify the complexity, eliminate handoff tasks and assignments, and automate service tasks while eliminating errors and optimizing the integrity of application-centric deployments.  Just another day’s work on the road!

Historically, it took 30 to 60 days to release a new application into production and a team of 25 people to execute the manual tasks and scripts required to complete the production deployment.  With Serena’s Release Management solution, the manual effort for a production deployment has been reduced by 60% and application releases are now deployed in 24 hours or less.  This faster cycle time provides a major competitive advantage for our customer.  Based on this success, this customer is expanding the use of the Serena solution across their application portfolio.  By year end, 90% of their revenue ($1.5B) will be generated by the application deployed with Serena.

It’s incredibly satisfying to speak to customers realizing this level of business value.  In a recent survey of our customers, 52% of respondents told us they are using Serena solutions to deploy their applications into production.  We’ll be sharing more of these customer stories in future posts.

But if requirements are so critical, why do so many organizations do such a poor job at managing them? Why have decades-old tools failed to resolve the problem? And why has agile still had limited success across the enterprise despite “light” management of requirements? 

The unfortunate truth is that many of the tools that were originally designed to help developers manage requirements are actually responsible for holding them back from delivering on customer requirements. According to Forrester, “Application development and program management professionals searching for the right requirements management solution often get tripped up by ambition…This leads them to purchase a tool that’s more complex, more difficult to use, and more expensive than is necessary.” 

Development organizations also sometimes get stuck in a feature-function analysis focused solely on “requirements management” that includes factors such as baselining, versioning, linking, and traceability, while ignoring the broader lifecycle of everything they need to do to capture requirements, understand their complexity and impact, and validate features. Instead of focusing solely on “requirements management,” often the best solution to development’s problems is looking at the entire process and how it’s impacted by change. 

Learn more about the process and phases of orchestrating the requirements lifecycle by reading the white paper, Orchestrating Your Requirements Process.

Thankfully, many of the corporations I have the pleasure of working with are doing well, and they are experiencing growing pains.  One such pain is frequent mainframe upgrades.  In the past, upgrades occurred years apart.  Now they are months apart.  An upgrade on the mainframe is a significant cost and one that isn’t always budgeted.  When your company grows, so do the jobs you submit.  Most times a customer doesn’t realize that if there was a way to make jobs run faster they’d not only get time back and stop the windows from shrinking, but they could slow down that impending upgrade price.

IBM provides us with all the mainframe machine resources we need, but it’s up to us to make the best use of them.  You might not realize this, but you’ve got two choices:

1. Have your best sysprog do some performance tuning 8 hours/day against generic scenarios.
2. Have it done dynamically in real-time for each and every job, 24/7.

Yes, we can instantly adjust all those resources on the fly automatically to improve the I/O throughput of your jobs.

Think about that – you’d get time back.  How much is that worth?  What could you do with more time?  Would your increased productivity allow you to get more done, and you’d generate more revenue?  You betcha!  I’ve seen customer jobs cut in half and the customers fell out of their chairs with delight.

Job Optimization is a solution of pure cost savings, cost avoidance, and increased productivity.  That’s got to fit into every CIO’s action plan.  It may be time to shrink your mainframe windows.

I got a sneak peak at Glenn’s part of the presentation.  I’m not going to divulge too much but I will say that it has both an Ops and software engineering slant.  He drives home the point about applying some engineering principles to managing the release, and the importance of managing release packages. His bottom line: Dev and Ops must come together and get in the same boat.  Glenn also does a good job of explaining adoption of ITIL v3 and growing interest in Release Management from all stakeholders.

This webcast is the 2^nd in a series of 3 Release Management webcasts with Forrester Research, Inc. The first one was with principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond – Five Ways to Streamline Release Management.  He provided “next practices” for improving release visibility and speed and a full report disclosing his research.  In the last webcast we’ll discuss the impact of agile development on release management.  Watch for it!

Register for DevOps – Development and Operations Working Together to Eliminate the Release Backlog.

Here’s what they were faced with:

• Tools for project management, testing, and software modeling operating in virtual silos.
• Manual compilation of information across different systems.
• An error-prone process for communicating the latest status to management.

This Fortune 100 healthcare company needed a way to orchestrate all of its disparate software teams, processes and tools together – essentially, orchestrate the entire application development process from initial project request to ongoing support.  The cure was thinking process orchestration first and systems second.  Serena helped them implement process automation and integration, requirements traceability across the development lifecycle and real-time enterprise dashboards.  The result was a 50% improvement of the effectiveness and efficiency of their application development process.

Now that’s a successful customer visit!

They’re often disappointed, leading to dissatisfaction with IT in general and widespread use of informal systems.  Left unchecked, this unfriendly face can lead to elevated service resolution costs, extended cycle times, and frustration within IT itself, all the while leaving end users convinced that IT isn’t a suitable business partner. 

Meanwhile back in IT, a process-based revolution has been declared.  ITIL succeeded in defining IT service management processes in standard fashion, while shining a light on the need to become process-based.  Activity-based approaches, ad hoc approaches, and disconnected silos are now properly frowned upon. 

At the executive level, CIOs know all this and also know that their sunk costs in rigid 20^th Century service management systems are a disproportionately expensive part of their portfolio.  Expensive, unfriendly and rigid is hardly a formula for success, especially for a system that literally defines IT in the minds of the vast majority of IT’s customers. 

This untenable situation has led to the increasingly widespread adoption of SaaS ITSM offerings.  These 21^st century services help with the cost issue and are at least superficially helpful in presenting a friendlier face to the business.  But they suffer from rigidity and a failure to embrace true process automation. 

The better approach is to orchestrate IT service management, whether delivered via SaaS or on-premises.  Orchestrate?  By Serena’s lights, this means to automate ITSM processes in a way that they become transparent, configurable and connected.  Orchestration leads to dramatic improvements in cycle time, compliance, adaptability and accountability. 

And friendliness.  Because a friendly face that fronts a flexible and accountable IT operation is a vital precursor to IT success. 

We at Serena are going to have much more to say about Orchestrated Service Management over the coming months.  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, watch the recorded webcast, Demo and Q&A: Unveiling of Serena Service Manager. 

Serena customers cover vast types of businesses, hundreds of integrated applications and thousands of use case experiences. We’d like to share a few of them with everyone. Tell us about your business requirements and share how Serena Software was able to meet those needs. Tell us about your journey and how your business has changed because of the implementation of Serena Software solutions.  

Topic ideas to get you thinking:

• Usability and user interaction with Serena technologies
• Maximizing Mainframe Value
• Best Practices implementing Serena solutions
• Requirements Management
• Integrated defect tracking and change management
• Cost savings with Serena solutions
• Audit improvements related to Serena Software
• Move to Agile methodology
• Automating IT processes
• Automated Release Management
• Complex business designs simplified by Serena solutions
• Using Serena solutions in a global environment

Either submit through our SBM application or email your proposal. Please include a tentative title and short content description and/or objective by April 22nd.

Papers submitted will be peer-reviewed. All selections will be complete by May 6th at which time all selected speakers will be notified of the decisions.

We’re looking forward to your unique and interesting proposals!

Visit www.serena.com/xchange for more information.

It was inspiring!  Civilian agencies and military branches alike are doing terrific things with their Serena software.  Developing apps faster, releasing them quickly and with high quality, and doing more with less.  That last is important around the world right now, but especially so in the halls of government.  It was heartening to see that Serena customers are part of the solution to this challenging budget situation.

Keep an eye out for a press release next week detailing the event, including the customer success awards that were handed out.

That is because customer satisfaction has always been our primary goal at Serena. I think that focus is why brand-name companies such as AT&T and GE have used Comparex for 25 years or more. As we begin our fourth decade in business, our plans include continuing to modernize and enhance our mainframe solutions, and maintaining the company’s reputation of excellence in the industry.

To commemorate Comparex’s 30th anniversary, Serena is rolling out a major new release of Comparex. Customers can expect to enjoy a new DB2 ISPF interface to enhance ease of use, an enhanced REXX interface, support for UNIX file systems, and UNICODE support. For more information on the new version, please visit http://www.serena.com/products/comparex/index.html

1. 2000 customers that absolutely love the flexibility of Serena Business Manager (SBM), the company’s BPM solution. With SBM customers, it’s the norm, not the exception to have automated upwards of 20 processes. That is certainly not typical of BPM implementations that I’d seen or heard of in my career. 
2. 300+ customers use SBM to automate ITSM processes today. That’s more customers and ITSM experience than Service-Now and a whole host of other ITSM vendors put together!
3. 1600+ customers clamoring for a flexible, cost-effective ITSM solution from Serena. They are fed up with the complex packaged ITSM solutions of old from the likes of BMC, CA and HP that are unintuitive and expensive to use and maintain and the “my way or the highway” SaaS offerings for ITSM that are out there. Serena had all the right elements to alleviate that pain.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve probably met with 50 customers and demonstrated our new process-based ITSM solution, Serena Service Manager. The response has been great. Lots of stories to share. It’s been a tremendous learning experience for the team.

Serena and IT Service Management? I’ve got my answers.

It doesn’t matter what your development processes look like, nor what methodology you’re following nor which platform you are developing for. Whatever your technology topology you will find that automation will significantly improve how you deliver applications.

Of course, it is all about the process and not the tools. But it is easier to improve automated processes than it is to improve manual ones; to enforce compliance, to obtain metrics, manage exceptions, and report on status… when automation is in place. So the rule of thumb here is “automate then optimize”. Of course, this results in the automation of bad processes. But it is going to be easier to fix that bad process in the long run.

So, who do we start with when we want to automate processes? The short answer is: we start where the most pain is being experienced. Automation brings rapid relief to organizational issues. These are often within a silo and can be implemented quickly, as all the decision-making authority is in one command structure.

They are, equally often, between silos, managing the boundary conditions and hand-offs, and can be implemented here too with speed and efficiency, though with more negotiation as two (or more) groups have the decision-making authority. As a result, it is essential to have senior management commitment to the automation project.

Whether it is managing the exchange of tasks and artifacts or just keeping track of status, the importance of automation cannot be understated. Incredible amounts of effort are expended in every IT department doing manually what could be done with automation. You need to find a champion on each team, in each silo, and involve them in every step of the automation process. Empower them to make the decisions for their team and make them responsible for communicating the project detail to their team members.

As we enter the deployment phase, your virtual team needs to celebrate the victories and highlight the benefits that are being accrued from the automation. This means regular comparison of the results with previous baselines of data so that the productivity gains can be shown and that the error rates can be seen as falling.

In the webinar Jeffrey talked about how top development organizations address release management, key industry trends, and opportunities for optimizing development organizations to support the release management process.  Plus, the results of Forrester’s market research and release management survey were revealed.

We learned that:

• The velocity and volume of releases are increasing rapidly.  Manual and fragmented processes will not scale. 
• Agile adoption among development teams is highlighting the lack of release automation and an increasingly visible bottleneck is forming that does not satisfy the needs of the business, development or operations.
• Organizations need to revisit release management in relation to other ALM practices, such as build and software configuration management, testing and quality assurance, project management and deployment.

To tie release management together with these ALM practices and streamline the workflow, while leveraging your existing infrastructure, Forrester recommended five “next practices” for improving release visibility and speed:

1. Improve prebuild process.
2. Expand release management throughput.
3. Optimize release pipelines.
4. Design software for rapid change.
5. Create common release portals.

Read more on Forrester’s findings in Jeffrey Hammond’s report, Five Ways to Streamline Release Management.

• Saves costs, drives revenue and mitigates risk.
• Provides traceability for changes.
• Moves artifacts through a lifecycle of structure and rigor.
• And most importantly – it protects production. 

Yet as sound as this is, I’m amazed at how the other half of the mainframe is open and unprotected.   By and large, most firms don’t have any change governance in place against the system software (the software that’s running your mainframe).  This means that your system programmers can grab any object or member, make a change and throw it into production.  

When I see this in a mainframe shop, I say:  “Congratulations, you’ve got half of your world protected!”  At first they are a bit confused because they are proud of their change management system, until they realize that it’s only protecting the application code and not the system software.  This is the stuff that drives auditors crazy and, if it were known, would keep the CIO up at night.  

For the most part, there are fewer system programmers than application programmers in organizations, but their work is complex and crucial to operations.   And when questioned about change governance against system software objects, most firms will admit that this is an unprotected area currently being controlled by a bunch of good people being very careful.  The reality is that allowing your mainframe system software to be vulnerable is a large business liability that can affect your continuity of operations.   Think about it this way: it’s impossible to run your mainframe billing application if the mainframe is not working properly.    

It only makes sense — protect your mainframe system software… all of it! 

Is this your situation? Does your Auditor or CIO know this?  Give me your thoughts in a comment below.

They currently use Dimensions CM as the Release Vault for their next generation application platform.  They are heavily invested in this platform and need to manage the significant code deployments that accompany an agile development process.  By leveraging Dimensions and Release Automation the customer is now capable of scaling to support enterprise agile development (removing the bottleneck that was present in release management) and ensuring releases are consistently delivered correctly every time. 

Much of the release process was automated and improved, greatly increasing productivity.  They were able to save 25 man-hours a week spent on collaboration, coordination, and orchestration of releases with the database and middleware teams.  They eliminated the need for additional full-time employees and are now able to re-allocate current resources from sitting and monitoring releases to planning and working on other releases.

Wow.  It’s results like this that make this job fun!

Tools
As we have seen, every application development group has a huge extant investment in technologies to support their efforts. Ripping them out and replacing them with something generic, but integrated, is not the answer.

We need to step up our requirements in the identification and selection of tools for application development. In fact, I want you to start to demand two things from each of your vendors starting today:

1. Is the tool process-centric and does it support a flexible process model? Any tool that insists you follow its model rather than your own should be crossed off the shortlist. Insist on tools that are process-centric and that support your ability to customize the process without having to write code to do so!
2. Is the tool open? Does the tool have an open, standards-based, API and does that include the ability to run the tool without a user interface? Does the API support both a push and pull model? Can the tools be driven from an event generator? Does the tool generate events? Only with the broadest and most open API will you ever get the depth of integration you need for Orchestrated ALM.

Make these essential requirements in your vendor RFP’s and RFI’s today. Integration at the process level is essential.

Integrations: the other great myth
Point-to-point integrations are the answer vendors say. “We can integrate our point tool to their point tool.” But when they do, the point-to-point integrations are usually limited in functionality, barely offer more than automated cut-and-paste and are all too often very brittle. Upgrade the software at one end of the integration and the integration falls apart. And you, the customer, are left trying to get vendors to fix the integration.

Interfaces
Ideally the tools one uses have role-specific user interfaces.

There has been a trend recently to create the all-singing-all-dancing IDE with every conceivable feature and function buried in them down amongst many layers of menus. But the one-size-fits-all myth applies to interfaces too. We need role-specific user interfaces.

Classes and libraries are jargon that is fine for a developer but resources and collections might be better for a user interface designer. Painting pictures with a stylus might be right for the web designer but a Java IDE is better for the web developer. One size does not fill all.

So this means it is essential to use tools that meet your UI needs not those of the vendor. And if you do not have the tool in that part of the lifecycle you can easily create one with the automation of the process steps with your automation tool.

Reports, controls and measurement
If we implement all of these features and connect them together with the automation tool we will be able to:

• Create the kind of reporting dashboards that allow us to manage our business.
• Implement controls so we can ensure the right stakeholders give informed consent to projects as they move through the lifecycle.
• Get real-time data, trending over time, so we can see where we are improving development efforts and where we are making them worse.

When we look at most dashboards they are awash with charts and grids and are more colorful than Harlequin’s suit. What we need are the key indicators of performance and we need to limit this to less than ten. For the CIO they might be:

• Percentage of projects delivered on time
• Percentage of planned content delivered
• Percentage of projects delivered to budget
• Percentage of defects reported post delivery

For the VP of App. Dev. they might be:

• Percentage of requirements changed post freeze
• Average number of items in developer queues
• Average number of closed tickets per day
• Number of severity 1 issues outstanding more than 24 hours
• Percentage of automated tests that fail
• Percentage of automated test coverage

Whatever we choose as our key indicators we can now have this information delivered to us because of process automation. But another key benefit of automation is the guarantee that processes will be followed and the designated individuals will be able to insert themselves into the process and confirm their approval (or disapproval) at each step of the lifecycle. This is essential for accountability and traceability.

Summary
So you need to define your high-level process. And then your low-level ones.

We implement the high-level ones in our automation tool. The low-level ones are implemented in the tool of choice for the phase.  If there is no tool, we implement in the process automation tool.

We connect the low-level tools to the high-level process via web-services based integrations. We do this based on the process needs, not on point-to-point capabilities.

Where there are parts of the lifecycle that are not supported by tools we create the interfaces we need so that every stakeholder is required to participate in the process.

We develop dashboards, controls and key performance indicators based on the automation.

I know it sounds easy and it is really. It just requires effort and dedication supported by commitment and open-mindedness. Not a lot to ask.

You can refresh your memory by reading my previous posts on Orchestrating Application Delivery:

• Part 1 (why)
• Part 2a (what)
• Part 2b (what)

We will look at the “how” in several parts:

• Processes: in terms of micro and macro processes.
• Tools: the underlying data storage they use, the processes they encapsulate and the integration points they offer.
• Integrations and the other myth.
• Interfaces: how the user interacts, if the user interacts.
• Reports, controls, measures and the whole battery of mechanisms that make Orchestrated Application Delivery the reason we are making the this quantum leap.

Processes
In the quest for the perfect development process we strive to create the one, the simple, the direct, the optimized definition of how we develop software. When we follow this path we inevitably run into trouble. There is no such thing as the one path for development. Better we try to solve the problem in chunks.

Macro
Start by defining the macro-level process into major phases that are meaningful to your development process. You probably have this already.  You most likely call it your SDLC, your software development lifecycle. In the most straightforward terms it is the process from the Demand arriving at the door of IT, through the Development phases that design, create and test the solution to the Deployment of the solution into the production environment. Or Planning, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Maintenance (according to Wikipedia) or any one of a hundred different methodologies.

This macro-level process needs to have as many phases required to track your project and provide meaningful feedback to senior management. However, keep it high level so that the granularity of phases isn’t meaningless.  A good rule of thumb is to pick an odd number of phases between 3 and 9 and you have the right number.  Implement these phases directly in your process automation tool. From this you will create business-level dashboards.

Micro
Within each of these macro-level phases think about what the micro-level detail steps need to look like and then think about how they will be implemented.  Will a tool be used extensively in this phase? If so does the tool have the ability to implement the process model you need for this phase at a detailed level? Does the tool have the ability to communicate to other tools in the lifecycle? Does the tool have the ability to communicate with the high level process automation tool managing the SDLC, macro-level?

Perhaps we have no tools at all.  In which case we must automate hand-offs and sign-offs so that everyone involved in the project is included in the automation. Essentially, we need to create interfaces for them to interact.  What if there are point-solution tools that are completely isolated in one phase and have no integration points?

Next, we should ask if the process steps in the phase will be the same each time through. The answer ought to be yes but before we rush to that answer, consider these possibilities:

• We have web, client-server and mainframe development. Tools will certainly be different. Time-frames and sign-offs will also. Perhaps they need separate micro-level processes.
• We have agile, lean and waterfall development styles. Inputs and outputs may be different; measurement certainly is.
• We have high risk projects, mission critical projects, time-to-market sensitive projects. These often lead to different development processes at the micro-level.
• We have new development, enhancement, maintenance and emergency projects. Are their processes the same?

We need to implement the micro-process in the tool of choice for that phase of the lifecycle or we need to introduce automation using our process automation tool of choice.  I’ll talk about tools, integrations, interfaces and reports in my next post.

Good news like this is often triggered by bittersweet news.  In this case, longtime R&D head Carl Theobald’s departure from the company set the ball in motion.  Carl is leaving to stretch his experience beyond R&D.  He’s a rare and special talent and a first rate executive, so we’re expecting great things from him in the wide open future.

Serena R&D is now organized into two business units.

• Our market leading ALM and mainframe business unit is led by Steve Brodie, one of Carl’s excellent hires into Serena.  Steve’s deep experience includes product leadership at fellow ALM pioneer Rational Software.
• Expansion of our backbone SBM product is now being led by Kamran Kheirolomoom.  A proven executive from the BPM and app prototyping world, Kamran reunites in this role with his longtime technology partner Ali Kheirolomoom, who leads SBM platform and solution development.

Bench strength is one of Serena’s assets, as this R&D evolution proves.  Stay tuned for news about their contributions.

Please also plan on joining us at xChange 2011 in September to meet and hear from Steve, Kamran and Ali directly.

89% of the respondents rated all of the options “important.” But what was the most important?

Managing application as a business process wins out. 75% rated it very important or extremely important. 28% rate it extremely important.

The graph below shows the different initiatives and how people rated their importance.

Adam Frankl is the VP of Corporate and Community Marketing at Serena Software. He has over 20 years’ experience in the software development world, starting as a software engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works. Before joining Serena, he was Director of Marketing for Rational Rose and the UML. He is also the founder and former editor of The Rational Edge and Dr. Dobbs Requirements Development Journal.

Effective Release Management 

An effective Release Management strategy will:

1. Improve Release Management efficiency.
2. Increase production up-time.
3. Ensure compliance.
4. Improve communication within Release Management processes.

When you can achieve these four things, change can become more of a competitive weapon for the business, instead of a liability.

Effective Release Management gives you the confidence and competencies to make more changes. For this reason, it’s a great complement to Agile development.  You can deliver code changes every 3 to 4 weeks instead of every 6 or 10 or 12 months. And all while ensuring business continuity. 

Release Management a Process Problem 

Over the last 30 years, I have worked with hundreds of customers on improving their change management. I’ve seen their pain in releasing code into production.  I recognized that Release Management wasn’t a tools problem but a process problem due to:

1. Poor communication.
2. Lack of a central repository for release statuses.
3. Long length of time to track root causes of problems. 

Everything takes too long, and exposes the business to too much risk.

The Release Management Solution

So we have to build our release management solution on a process-first, tools-second philosophy – one that connects and automates the entire process.  The process then drives the right tools by remote control. Because everything is connected, the system provides a single source of truth about releases – a place where everyone involved can go to see exactly what’s happening, right from their Web browsers. 

It continues with an end-to-end framework, which connects automated Release Management activities across departmental boundaries, geographies, development methodologies and computing platforms, both mainframe and distributed. It connects all the processes involved, from RFCs through deployment, and provides that all-important top-down view, while leaving key data in their source systems. 

With automated policies and a framework in place, you can do things that vastly accelerate and strengthen Release Management.  In the future we need to look at how Release Management information can be driven directly into the CMDB in the data center.  This will open up a wave of new opportunity to accelerate business change.

Download Serena’s Release Management whitepaper, Closing the Gap in Application Lifecycle Management.

What were the top Application Delivery Priorities?

1. Deliver Applications Faster
2. Reduce App Dev Costs
3. Expand the use of Agile

This is a change from what I have been hearing the last few years, when reducing costs was the #1 priority. More IT and AD professionals identify delivering applications faster as a priority than just cutting costs. As we emerge from the Great Recession worldwide, innovation and, especially, the speed of innovation are the priority. And I can’t think of a time in my 20-year career when there has been a higher profile for software applications, a broader range of available platforms, and more data available. We may be entering the Golden Age of App Development.

Download the Orchestrated ALM Whitepaper to learn how you can deliver applications faster, reduce app dev costs and expand the use of Agile.

One-size-fits-all fits me

So enter the one-size-fits-all (OSFA), one-stop-shop, everything-you-wanted-all-in-one-place tools. These tools try to provide an end-to-end solution that does facilitate the support of the whole lifecycle. The problem is that these tools come from vendors who have to reach a mass audience and so they develop very generic solutions that are entirely agnostic as to your role in the SDLC, your organization’s domain or methodology, best practices, policies and procedures. The big selling point for them is often their “single repository” database. I have all my artifacts in one database and I can control access to everything from that one place.

While the concept seems to make sense you have to dig a little deeper and ask some questions. Most of these tools are incredible “bloatware” solutions with hundreds of menus and options and a dizzying battery of configuration and customization needs. But perhaps the most insidious feature of these tools is that they are optimized for a single platform. Whether it is optimized for the OS, the hardware, the language, the methodology; these tools are trying to force you focus on one OS/platform/hardware/methodology. But today’s applications are highly heterogeneous because we constantly innovate in our solutions and embrace new ideas and incorporate them into extant systems. Of course migrating all your existing data into one of these OSFA products is expensive, time consuming and very error prone.  And let’s not forget none of these vendors is the domain expert in every part of the lifecycle. So these bloatware tools provide adequate to capable functionality throughout but never the deeper capabilities for dealing with the inevitable corner-cases we all have in all of our systems.

Best-of-all

So what is the answer? There is a hybrid solution here that needs to be considered. You want best-in-class tools but you want them to work together and support your end-to-end delivery process.

Orchestrated Application Delivery addresses this problem directly, simply and preserves your existing investment in solutions you have chosen because they meet your technology needs. It supports your methodology and topology and geographical challenges. It is designed to allow the most flexible implementation without massive data migration and it supports an evolutionary roll-out strategy (not a revolutionary overturn everything we hold dear because we have new tool to implement strategy!).

We’ll look at how this works in my next post.

Best-in-class is best

Each part of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is a silo. No matter your role, whether an architect, designer, developer, tester, release engineer or whatever you are blessed with incredibly good technology tools to support your ability to conceive and deliver your part of the application. These are point solution tools. They usually come from specialist vendors with decades of experience in developing tools specifically to support that part of the lifecycle. These tools speak your language, they are optimized for how you work and they encapsulate the best practices and modern methodologies of your part of the application delivery experience.

However these tools are not best suited for collaboration across the lifecycle, they rarely provide any automation for the handoff from one phase of the SDLC to the next. There is frequent cut-and-paste from one database to another often requiring some kind of data migration and transformation process to run. The tools don’t “talk” to each other and so when data changes in one it is not reflected in the other. And when the tools are integrated that integration is often very brittle and fails as soon as one or other of the tools is upgraded.

In my next post I’ll examine the second myth and give you the solution to your application delivery problems.

Kevin Parker is a 30 year industry veteran, holder of three technology patents and is VP and Chief Evangelist at Serena Software. He speaks and writes on application development methodologies, business analysis, quality assurance techniques, governance, open source issues, and tool interoperability, from the mainframe to distributed platforms to the web and mobile and embedded systems. Kevin was born and educated in the UK and currently lives on a boat on the San Francisco Bay.

Agile is clearly important. And companies are moving to cloud-based solutions. But, SD Times lists Serena’s Orchestrated ALM Vision as the third big story.

Excerpts from the article:

Recognizing that stakeholders and customers are now more involved with projects than ever before, Serena thinks of release management as a process issue, which became the origin of its “Orchestrated ALM” vision.  

The new vision’s solutions include change management and version control, requirements and request management, and release control for BPM. Although these solutions are not new, the real idea of the Orchestrated ALM vision is to keep both businesspeople and developers on the same page.

 Read the entire article, Year in Review: ALM.

Mark continues and offers this advice: 

• It’s a big problem to tackle.
• Look for an automation tool that makes sense.
• It’s critical to have the development staff on board.
• It can be difficult to get the deployment team involved.
• Put a skilled developer on the deployment team.

Read the article on SearchSoftwareQuality.com (registration required). It’s worth your time.

“The good news is that gap between developers and the IT operations teams are starting to close as the latest generation of ALM tools concentrate on making the operations team as flexible as the developers have become.”

Read the entire post on ChannelTechCenter.com.

Download Serena’s Orchestrated ALM Whitepaper.

Read Forrester’s research paper, 5 Ways to Streamline Release Management.

“If you aren’t doing ALM today and software is important to your business, you need to start thinking about how to get transparency, how to get understanding of the application process flow, and to think of software as a business process.”

We are hearing this from more and more application delivery leaders… the need to view application development as a business process.

Read the entire article, “Forrester: Businesses need app lifecycle management.”

Download Serena’s Orchestrated ALM Whitepaper.

Think of application development as a business process.

Yes, I know they think they have information, but the reality is they have opinion masquerading as pretty Gantt charts fooling them into thinking they have data about the state of their business. If we continue to think that going to status meetings is the way to get status we will continue to struggle to run IT and we will never deliver the kind of quality, ROI and timeliness the business is demanding.

When the CFO asks if invoices are paid we do not have a status meeting. We offer up empirical data showing the exact disposition of each and every invoice, accurate to the penny from our computerized systems.

So why can’t we do that for IT projects?

As one customer said to me recently in New York, “because developing software is not like invoicing”; and she’s right. Invoicing is incredibly complex and integrated into the fabric of the business so deeply that just about everything we do affects invoices.

Developing software is a straight forward process and follows a more-or-less linear progression.  The rules are really clear and we have software to enforce them. My mentor and friend, Doug Troxel, once said to me “How can your job be so difficult when all you have is a ’1? and a ’0??”

So why is it that we continue to try and run IT as a manual process?

I know we think we have automation but what we have are hundreds of point tools (723 according to a VP of development at EADS and over 200 according to a VP of development at Ford). These tools help individuals complete their part of the lifecycle but they do nothing to assist in the transfer of information from one silo in IT to the next.

This is what I call the Archipelago Problem: lots of islands of technology but no integration between them other than rickety rope bridges and a few dugout logs acting as row boats. What we need is Highway 1 from Key Largo to Key West that is high speed, uniform and consistent.

Today’s software delivery processes are error prone, contain much that is duplicative and involve significant amounts of rework. If we sent invoices out that were wrong, what would we do? If we sent invoices out twice, what would we do? If we had to correct invoices and resend them, what would we do?

That’s right – we would find where the error was in the process and fix it and we would try to automate it so it doesn’t happen again.

This is what we must do for the software delivery process.

In the next three posts on Orchestrating Application Delivery I will look at how that might be achieved.

What they are saying might surprise you.

Adrian Bridgwater at Dr. Dobb’s writes that “delivering applications that power revenue generation or lower cost structures is the key to creating a compelling competitive advantage, especially given that virtualization and the cloud are commoditizing run-time environments.”

“Serena has built its orchestration approach around the application of process automation to the application delivery supply chain, potentially allowing software developers to work more effectively and reduce the challenges of siloed project teams working with multiple development tools and methodologies.

“Serena claims that its orchestrated ALM solution provides built-in traceability and auditability and also addresses another enterprise concern: the need to support the various tiers of today’s applications running on Linux, Windows, and mainframe.

“Orchestration is the key to enterprise-class application delivery success,” said David Hurwitz, SVP of worldwide marketing at Serena Software. “Our customers need to streamline workflows, leverage their valuable talent, and exploit their existing infrastructure. They’ve overwhelmingly told us that flowing work and insight to developers, analysts, executives, operations managers, and everyone else involved in the application lifecycle is the right approach. No ALM vendor has stepped up to this challenge, until now.”

“By creating a ‘software supply chain,’ companies can increase efficiencies around globally distributed software and provide an end-to-end, integrated approach to software development,” said Thomas Murphy, research director at Gartner.

Read the entire post, “Serena Returns with New Orchestrated Application Strategy.”

More coverage of Serena’s announcements:

• David Rubinstein at SD Times: “Serena Shares Vision of Orchestrated ALM.”
• Mike Vizard, at CTO Edge: “Serena Takes Holistic Approach to ALM.”

In the interview he was eager to hear about how Serena saw the future and how we were executing against that. In his excellent blog post he captured perfectly the strong Orchestrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) messaging and vision that is driving Serena.

David’s key insight in his post is that “process improvement will be a key characteristic of next generation development.” As more application development organizations become increasingly globalized, making the end to end process efficient is essential to controlling costs and increasing the speed of application delivery.

He also interviewed Robert Cowham, Chair of the BCS CMSG (Specialist Group for Change, Configuration and Release Management), who thinks “the new pitch around orchestration seems much more real and consistent with a company focused around tools and solutions for managing application lifecycles.”

With great new products and a host of successful customers already implemented there is a renewed sense of energy and excitement in the corporation. And with some very high profile wins against well-funded competition Serena continues to demonstrate its technology leadership.

Read David Norfolk’s entire blog post, “Welcome Back Serena.”

Gartner’s presentation was very interesting. According to their research, application development is at a cusp. Old ways of doing things creaking because of new demands businesses are placing on IT: more accountability, stakeholder involvement and transparency. IT has to deliver faster, to more platforms, with greater accuracy and to use leading edge technologies with brand new tools and methods. The added complexity introduces more risk and uncertainty.

According to Tom’s research the cure for developments ills are well known: detecting defects earlier, decreasing project size and tracking activity with metrics.  One surprising conclusion Tom Murphy asserts is that Release Management has become a critical battleground in terms of automation. He tells a story of one client who has a 542 line Excel spreadsheet containing the details of how to release a particular piece of code. The complexity of releases, massive interdependence of systems, velocity of change in infrastructure components all make release management one of the most sophisticated problems we have that is crying out for automation. 

These points dovetailed perfectly with Serena’s Orchestrated Application Delivery story. For 30 years we’ve delivered process-centric solutions from one end of the lifecycle to the other. In collaboration with a large number of our customers we have connected our solutions through Demand to the Development to Delivery (D2D) lifecycle using end-to-end process automation based on the Serena Orchestrator platform powered by Serena Business Manager. 

This automated ALM enables real-time information and metrics for indicators that Tom suggested IT management is starved of. Supporting both waterfall and Agile methodologies it delivers code faster. The solutions allow for process optimization eliminating rework and driving the detection of errors earlier in the lifecycle. 

We need to get end-to-end connectivity between and amongst our people, processes and tools. Otherwise we will continue to waste time and money by doing unnecessary work, having manual processes, duplicating effort because we either don’t trust and/or don’t communicate.

To learn more about Serena’s Orchestrated Application Delivery, click on the image below to watch the video.