News

Serena Launches New Strategy, Products

• By Michael Desmond
• November 18, 2010

Release Management Solution consists of three modules: Release Control for planning, scheduling, tracking and approval management; Release Vault for version control, automated rollback and repository and production handling; and Release Automation for script, audit trail and cross-tier/cross-environment operations. Adam Frankl, vice president of Corporate and Community Marketing at Serena, said Release Management targets the disconnect that exists between the development and IT sides of many organizations.

"You have Agile processes producing a high tempo of releases, and you have a deployment organization trying to keep their releases stable," said Frankl. "Relying on the old tools of email and spreadsheets just isn't working."

Frankl said Serena's tooling can help businesses deal with unprecedented budget pressures. "The demand for business applications has never been higher and the demand for mobile platforms has never been higher, but the budgets are not increasing and the head counts are not increasing."

Serena Release Management is available today. Pricing varies but begins at $50,000 per seat, Frankl said.

Serena's Return
The Release Management Solution announcement comes as part of a larger initiative by Serena Software, which for the past two years has focused on its Business Mashups strategy. Serena Business Mashups were intended to enable rapid build and deployment of simple applications by power users at the departmental level. "That move did not turn out as expected," Frankl said.

Serena this week announced its Orchestrated ALM strategy, which aims to provide a framework that ties together existing tools in the enterprise development organization.

"We have a strategy that takes us back to our roots, which is application lifecycle management for the largest enterprise. And the other part of it is moving to a solution process rather than presenting customers with a price list of products," Frankl explained.

Frankl said Serena is targeting "highly regulated environments," such as insurance, financial services and health care.