Serena Software Ships Industry's First Change Governance Solution for Application Lifecycle Management; Serena Dimensions 10 Drives Next-Generation ALM for Distributed, Heterogeneous Development and Faster Time to Application Value

Business Wire, Sept 12, 2006

LAS VEGAS -- Serena Software, Inc., the Change Governance(TM) leader, today announced Serena(R) Dimensions(TM) 10, the first Change Governance solution for distributed application lifecycle management (ALM). Unveiled at Serena's worldwide user conference, Dimensions 10 automatically unifies the software change lifecycle with a single integrated process, to ensure that enterprise applications meet business requirements on time, cost-effectively, and with full auditability. Cross-platform and highly scalable, Dimensions 10 can easily address any enterprise development environment, enabling IT to deliver greater value to the business in the face of constant change.

According to a September 2006 Forrester Research report, "IT organizations spend billions of dollars a year on development lifecycle tools that don't play well together...But tomorrow's ALM platforms will do much better by providing common services to practitioner tools." Serena's approach is recognized as offering a single vendor, single repository ALM platform that also addresses multivendor environments.(1)

"The release of Serena Dimensions 10 is a watershed event for our customers and the ALM industry. It brings unprecedented integration, automation, visibility, and traceability to the development process and puts businesses in control of changes occurring throughout their enterprises," said Mark Woodward, CEO and president, Serena Software. "Serena's Change Governance solution for ALM is the culmination of 25 years of experience meeting the needs of some of the world's leading organizations."

Only Serena Dimensions 10 automatically unifies the software change lifecycle -- from inception to deployment -- with one integrated process model and one data repository to optimize application development under conditions of continuous change. It seamlessly integrates multiple platforms, multiple roles, and global locations -- and it leverages the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) to embrace customer investments in third-party tools. As a result, enterprises can control application changes across IT and business units to provide full auditability, timely response, and measurable business impact.

"We are thrilled with Serena's new offering in Dimensions 10. The new platform will improve productivity and quality through a single, integrated system for requirements, change, configuration, build and deployment management," said Jim Hendricks, manager of quality and process improvement at AutoZone, based in Memphis, Tenn.

Change Governance Solutions Drive Next-Generation ALM

Projected to grow to a $3.3 billion market by 2009(2), the ALM market has evolved from ad hoc, home grown tools and processes for managing change into a critical success factor for any business that relies on software systems to achieve business objectives. This evolution is largely driven by the volume, scale, and urgency of today's business pressures, including competition, demand for increased innovation, globalization, outsourcing, offshoring, and new regulations.

"Up to now, many of the planning and control elements of the development lifecycle have not been well integrated. This situation often leads to outages and lower productivity in the enterprise," said Jim Duggan, research vice president, Research Group, Gartner. "Companies need well coordinated, end-to-end process control throughout the application development lifecycle -- from inception through requirements to deployment -- to govern change successfully across the enterprise. An effective, process-centric approach has to accommodate the reality of today's development teams that may be geographically dispersed, working in a variety of technologies and on a variety of platforms."

Now, with Serena's Change Governance solution for ALM, developers have a closed-loop, process-centric approach to controlling enterprise-wide software change. Dimensions 10 lets users continuously manage and execute change requests and events through a shared, transparent, and comprehensive process framework. As a result, IT departments are able to streamline developer productivity and audit each step of the process, improving the speed and quality of enterprise application development. The new role-based dashboard in Dimensions 10 provides visibility across the entire application lifecycle with comprehensive reporting and compliance enforcement.

"Serena has delivered a very robust solution with the new Dimensions 10 release and we look forward to upgrading," said Gary Soule, manager of IT application lifecycle management at Premera Blue Cross, based in Mountlake Terrace, WA. "With a user-friendly interface, dashboard capabilities, IDE integration, project views, and other great features, Serena will continue to provide real value to Premera by further mitigating risk, providing excellent traceability and streamlining software configuration management."

Serena Dimensions 10 Turns Change Into Business Advantage

Serena Dimensions 10 is a Change Governance solution for ALM that enables users to visualize the impact of proposed changes before they happen, orchestrate processes and policies to ensure controlled, automated workflow across multiple personas or teams, and enforce IT-wide adherence to best practices and regulatory standards. Highlights include: