Serena Software announced enhanced offerings that help automate, control and instrument important application development and operations processes to deliver DevOps and Orchestrated IT. DevOps is the growing practice of developers and operations teams working in tandem to roll out and manage applications, and Serena defines "Orchestrated IT" as IT management systems that tie together existing tools into a more streamlined process-driven human workflow.
Serena has been promoting the idea of orchestrated apps and ops for the last year, and with this announcement which includes Serena Demand Management, and Serena Requirements Management, "We now feel that we have an end to end solution set which we are calling orchestrated IT," says Kevin Parker, vice president and chief evangelist at Serena Software. "We use the word ‘orchestrated' because the metaphor we are going for is the idea that developing software and managing software is like trying to get music out of an orchestra; without a score to follow, you would end up with a cacophony," Parker tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The message we deliver to customers is that the most important thing that they can do to improve the way in which they do software delivery is to have a process." While most organizations have a process, Parker notes, the key is to have a process that is completely automated.
The new technology provides them with the ability to integrate their existing tools including homegrown tools, third party tools from Serena partners and competitors, as well as Serena tools so that they can bring them all to work collaboratively together, says Parker. "And because of the automation, we are now able to mine the activities and then mine the data in the various databases of those tools and provide real-time dashboards about exactly what is going on in the business."
Additions to Serena's Orchestrated IT solution set include Serena Orchestrated IT Dashboard, Serena Demand Manager, and Serena Requirements Manager. In addition, major new releases of Serena Service Manager, Serena Release Manager, Serena Request Center, Serena Development Manager and the Serena Business Manager platform have been introduced.
The new Serena Orchestrated IT Dashboard brings actionable intelligence to the head of Dev, the head of Ops and to their boss, the CIO. The Orchestrated IT Dashboard provides almost two dozen pre-defined metrics like cycle times, queue sizes, wait times and SLA performance. Super simple configuration makes it easy to draw even more metrics from Serena and non-Serena IT management tools, focusing on KPIs and traceability metrics.
In addition, new Serena Demand Manager provides a facility for prioritizing all IT work, presenting alternative portfolio scenarios and optimizing resources to fulfill any type of IT demand. Serena Demand Manager's pragmatic and highly intuitive interface represents fresh innovation in a stale IT governance market that has been hijacked by heavyweight PPM systems.
The new Serena Requirements Manager debuts as an integrated suite and provides enterprise IT organizations comprehensive capabilities to define and manage requirements, from initial prototype to production release, reducing rework, accelerating development and ensuring complete requirements traceability.
Serena Orchestrated IT Dashboard is available now. Serena Demand Manager and Serena Requirements Manager will be available in spring 2012. For details on Serena's complete range of Orchestrated IT solutions, go to Serena Software.
To promote the Orchestrated IT message, Serena is also debuting Doug Serena, CIO, a web-video miniseries that follows a savvy CIO as he reaps the benefits of Orchestrated IT to deliver massive economic advantage to his company. The first webisode of Doug Serena, CIO can be viewed at www.serena.com/DougSerenaCIO, with all new webisodes to follow weekly through March and into April.