Serena Software announced advancements to its “Orchestrated IT” solution set, now designed to help enterprises take full advantage of mobile, social and cloud technologies. Serena’s solutions are designed to help IT stakeholders to automate the continuous delivery of applications on-premise and to the cloud, as well as enable users to view release activity, analytics and key metrics from mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets.
Serena's Orchestrated IT approach focuses on automating processes and integrating with the existing tools and systems that are in-house, David Hurwitz, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Serena, tells 5 Minute Briefing. This is important, he notes, because an increasing number of industries are now generating revenue through their applications in new ways. “We have seen this with financial services and internet companies, but now we are seeing it with retailers, manufacturers, and other brick and mortar industries,” he explains. “They are becoming online enterprises, and need to be agile in how they do that.”
Serena’s new and enhanced Orchestrated IT products add developer-driven continuous delivery with cloud provisioning; an IT catalog, control and analytics on smart phones and tablets; and full-cycle social IT capabilities.
Specifically, Serena has added development-driven release management to its support for operations-driven release management for its new Serena Release Manager product. According to Serena, development-driven releases are characterized by continuous delivery, which are especially useful during pre-production phases of the application delivery lifecycle.
Serena Release Manager also supports intelligent deployments, which deploy only what has changed, reducing deployment time and costs and minimizing business risk. The product now also provides an enhanced cloud deployment ability, including scheduling and tracking deployments to Amazon Web Services. The new release builds on the successful Serena Release Manager, which has been “the most robust and full-featured release management solution in the industry,” says Hurwitz. And, with the new version, now it is equally strong for developer-driven release management as it has been for operations release management, he adds.
In addition, Serena Service Manager is the first Serena Orchestrated IT solution to incorporate the new Orchestrated IT Feed. Leveraging social IT capabilities to resolve issues quickly, the Orchestrated IT Feed allows stakeholders to monitor and participate in customized activity streams, and make more informed decisions as a team. Stakeholders can find and collaborate with an expert, “follow” an item, person or issue, and receive updates via Twitter, Yammer, email or SMS.
Another new component, Serena Mobile Request Center, takes the request fulfillment process mobile, enabling both business and IT users to browse services and associated SLAs, as well as submit, monitor, fulfill or approve requests from mobile devices. iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android users can monitor the status of requests and key metrics while on the go. SerenaMobileRequestCenter enables “anybody, anywhere” to make a request and also enables people in IT to manage the whole fulfillment lifecycle on their mobile devices, Hurwitz adds.
Also new, the Serena Mobile Dashboard brings IT analytics to the Apple iPad. With executive adoption of tablets for business on the rise, the Serena Mobile Dashboard lets IT executives use the iPad to access and interact with the latest KPIs and dashboards. Intuitive drill-downs, simple data manipulation and rapid personalization make it easy to find the right information at the right time to run IT more efficiently. The Serena Mobile Dashboard is available now in the Apple App Store.
Serena Business Manager is the process management platform at the core of all Serena Orchestrated IT solutions. The new Orchestrated IT Feed enables IT stakeholders to access and collaborate on the latest information relevant to their jobs. Stakeholders can choose to receive task-related updates in real time via Twitter, Yammer, email or SMS. The social feed approach also enables different IT stakeholders to subscribe to feeds based on their roles, says Hurwitz.
For more information, go to the Serena website.