Serena Software has announced new technology and customer milestones in its Orchestrated Application Lifecycle Management strategy.
Serena officials said customer success stories from the field, including CVS Caremark and Kutxa-Vital Banco de Madrid, along with enhanced requirements and development management solutions and a new Orchestrated ALM dashboard, demonstrate that Serena is delivering on its ALM strategy unveiled last fall.
Serena’s orchestrated approach applies process automation to the application delivery supply chain, allowing software developers to work more effectively and reduce the challenges of siloed project teams working with multiple development tools and methodologies, Serena officials said. Since introducing the new Serena Release Management Solution in November 2010, Serena has gained recognition for providing enterprises a new way to identify and reduce rework, increase innovation throughput and improve responsiveness to the business.
Serena customers are achieving application delivery visibility (App Vision) through the orchestration of their Demand-to-Deployment processes. Applying orchestration to these processes has allowed Serena customers to experience tremendous gains in the way of shortened release times, increased customer satisfaction and a reduction in overall development costs.
“Serena was the first to orchestrate application demand, development and deployment as a software supply chain, and today we’re rendering measurable results from our early customer implementations,” said David Hurwitz, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Serena, in a statement. “While most software delivery teams have the right tools, roles and functions in place, getting these disparate elements working together has posed a significant challenge. Enterprises that orchestrate them do more than automate and connect. They measure, predict and improve the overall software delivery process.”
Among Serena’s worldwide customers to orchestrate and benefit from end-to-end application delivery are CVS Caremark, the U.K. Ministry of Justice, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and the Provincial and Kutxa-Vital Banco de Madrid.
According to Serena officials, an effective dashboard must be able to flow work and insight to developers, analysts, executives, operations managers and other stakeholders in the application lifecycle. While other dashboards provide a view into KPIs (key performance indicators) and correlated metrics, most are built to report on a single vendor’s technology. This prevents companies from gaining an intelligent, comprehensive and timely look at how their critical processes are functioning.
With Serena’s new Orchestrated ALM dashboard, enterprises can achieve an unprecedented view into App Dev and gain valuable insight into development processes, across disparate tools and platforms, in a convenient “single pane of glass” view, the company said. Access to KPIs spanning demand, development and release management from a single dashboard gives companies the information they need to become more agile and responsive to areas needing improvement.
“Serena will allow CVS Caremark to do development cheaper, faster and better than ever before. Using Serena Requirements Manager, requirements will be tracked systematically from capture through to production deployment,” said Gary Healey, director of release operations at CVS Caremark, in a statement. All requirements are then directly linked to their corresponding test case and to the business process map. Improved visibility is another Orchestrated ALM benefit that CVS Caremark will receive with Serena, including the ability to measure cycle time and rework throughout the application delivery process.”
At the heart of Serena’s Orchestrated ALM solution lies new demand and development management capabilities that power automated, end-to-end application delivery. The technology delivers a high level of interoperability, integrating seamlessly with third-party products, like Microsoft Word, HP Quality Center and other Serena solutions, the company said.
To address demand management, Serena today announced a new version of Dimensions RM 11, the industry’s first fully Web-based solution for orchestrating the entire requirements management process from demand to development and the only requirements management solution available with built-in prototyping, Serena said. Key features include Comprehensive Engagement for managing requirements from initial request through production release; Lightning-Quick Coordination for fast handoffs and breaking down the requirements silos across disparate customers, teams and tools; and Quality with Confidence for consistently delivering high-quality requirements, despite frequent changes and multiple tools, the company said.
Serena also introduced a new Development Manager Suite, which integrates the newest version of Serena Dimensions CM and Serena Business Manager. The first enterprise-class solution for orchestrating global development, Serena Development Manager provides a way for organizations to streamline the development and maintenance of applications across multiple platforms, departmental processes and development tools. Key features include Platform-Proof Traceability to address compliance issues through automatic end-to-end traceability; Process-Based Development to accelerate development by identifying, measuring and removing process bottlenecks; and Globally Proven Scalability that streamlines the administration and sharing of development data for distributed development teams and partners.
We set out to improve how we manage the process for developing and maintaining software across our organization,” said Miren Alvarez Picos, IT director for Kutxa-Vital Banco de Madrid, in a statement. “This had to be based on an end-to-end view of the lifecycle for applications, from initial demand within the business units through to development and then release. Serena’s approach to orchestrated ALM fit our requirements exactly.”