Serena Launches Mashups on Demand, Agile Platform

Serena Software has delivered on its promise of bringing mashups to the cloud and on Sept. 10 will announce the availability of its Serena Mashups on Demand service. The company also is slated to demonstrate its upcoming on-demand agile development solution, which will be available in December.

The announcement and demonstration will take place at Serena Software's annual user conference, Serena Tag.

René Bonvanie, senior vice president of global marketing, partnerships and online services for Serena Software, said Serena's Business Mashups will be available on demand with no software to install or infrastructure to manage so that enterprise staff can build and deploy mashups faster. And this can help spur broader adoption of mashups throughout the enterprise, Bonvanie said.

Analyst company Forrester projected that the mashup market will be worth $700 million by 2013 in its May 2008 report, "The Mashup Opportunity."

"We now have a full mashups-on-demand capability in the cloud," Bonvanie said. "It's our whole suite in the cloud at a very aggressive pricing model."

Moreover, Bonvanie said Serena Mashups On Demand offers new features to create more consumer-style mashups, which is expected to encourage more users to embrace mashups as a way to solve simple business problems and be more productive. And as part of this on-demand release, Serena has integrated Rich Interface Mashups into the solution, allowing users to simply drag and drop widgets, RSS feeds, Flash components and other types of consumer data into their workplace mashups, he said.

"Serena Business Mashups allow knowledge workers around the world to automate processes to solve their everyday business problems," Bonvanie said.

Mashups On Demand is just one of three solutions Serena Software is providing in 2008 as SAAS (software as a service) solutions. In March, the company delivered its Serena Mariner project and portfolio management solution on demand, and later in 2008 will provide agile life-cycle management tools as a service, Bonvanie said. Serena Software claims it will be the first major application development tools vendor to deliver a pure agile tool set that allows IT departments and ISVs to manage agile projects over the Web.

Serena's subscription structure for Mashups On Demand is priced at $15 per user per month. That price includes an on-demand account to run mashups; Serena Mashup Composer, a point-and-click visual design tool for creating mashups; and access to free prebuilt business mashups that automate everyday processes.

Serena also announced plans to deliver a pure agile solution based on best practices via SAAS in December.

Bonvanie said Serena Agile On Demand will enable software development groups to add agile development to their development portfolios and support global teams working on multiple projects.

"We know there is still a lot of waterfall development out there, but there has been a massive adoption of agile development practices," Bonvanie said.

Serena Agile On Demand offers a new approach to adopting agile practices by coupling the developer tool with agile adoption and training services from Valtech, an agile services provider and Serena Software partner.

The new Agile On Demand solution will make it simpler and faster to manage concurrent agile projects with new capabilities and virtual training that fosters team collaboration whether a team is in the same room or spread across continents and time zones, Bonvanie said.

In addition, Serena's Agile On Demand offering combines tooling with agile transformation services, such as video instruction on common agile practices, virtual training on a comprehensive list of agile topics and live coaching where an expert is only a phone call away, the company said.

The "Coach Live" service is an exclusive offering from Valtech available only in Agile On Demand, Bonvanie said. Coach Live gives users access to an agile development coach who can walk a development team through adoption and transformation issues.

Other Agile On Demand capabilities include work management; sprint planning; release planning; reporting and dashboarding; collaboration, via RSS notifications, instant messaging, wiki support and virtual whiteboards for remote standup meetings; and mashup integration, in that the solution integrates with the Serena Business Mashups platform.

"Traditionally, agile practices have had higher adoption rates among smaller, co-located development teams, which today are a rarity," John Scumniotales, co-developer of the Scrum agile methodology and vice president of product development at Serena Software, said in a statement. "Our new Agile On Demand solution has been designed from the ground up to support multiproject and multimethodology environments, making agile accessible to any development team."

Moreover, Serena has announced a free agile certification training program that is open to anyone. More information on the program can be found at Serena.com/go/agile-training. The program includes $1,400 worth of agile training for free, Serena officials said.

Meanwhile, although Serena Software continues to produce a host of tools for the traditional application development life cycle, such as software configuration management tools and requirements management tools, the company's agile environment "does not necessitate any Serena products. But it works with them and also with other vendors' products," Bonvanie said. "It's an open environment and an on-demand environment, and we do not intend to deliver any software on-premises."

In addition, "We're doing this in a very aggressive way to ensure that people are successful," he said. "We think you should be able to run your first sprint with everything you need out of the box."