First end-to-end solution for ALM

BANGALORE, INDIA:Serena Software, a software company focused solely on application lifecycle management (ALM), has announced the availability of Serena Dimensions 10 in India. This is the industry’s first end-to-end solution for application lifecycle management (ALM), according to the company's press release.  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, Say company source.

According to Forrester Research, “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 multi-vendor environments.

“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 Keshav Prakash, Country Manager, India, Serena Software. “Serena’s enterprise ALM solutions are the culmination of 25 years of experience meeting the needs of some of the world’s leading organizations.”

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.

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 Dimensions, 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 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:

Single Integrated Process: Dimensions 10 integrates requirements, change, configuration, build, and deployment management through a single process model and unified data store to enable more efficient, cost-effective, and rapid development of applications with full traceability and auditability each step of the way.

Enterprise Scale: Dimensions 10 is the industry’s only cross-platform solution to leverage existing investments in hardware platforms (distributed, mainframe, and Web) as well as operating systems, technologies, and databases that can scale globally to integrate multiple sites, multiple project teams, and individual roles, supporting outsourced and offshore development initiatives.

Complete Lifecycle Visibility: Dimensions 10 features Serena Command Center™, a role-based dashboard that lets customers analyze performance metrics for projects across each development stage, putting all business and IT leaders in a better position to deliver strategic business value.

Developer Usability: Dimensions 10 offers wide support for third-party tools, including modeling and testing tools, as well as native integration with popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), such as Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio.Net, and native Windows Explorer integration. These features allow developers to work with the tools and within the environments they know and love, increasing user choice and productivity.

Easy Installation and Administration: Dimensions 10 is available via a single CD for quick and easy installation of all components on a modular basis, simplifying large-scale deployment and speeding time to application value.

“By leveraging Serena’s unique focus on software change, we have built a highly responsive framework that helps organizations control change across the enterprise and reach business goals,” said Carl Theobald, Serena’s senior vice president of products. “The key failing of traditional ALM offerings is that customers have been forced to write scripts to fill gaps in functionality and to provide linkages between various process stages. With Serena Dimensions 10, customers no longer have to face the cost, error, and exposure to risk in terms of compliance and regulatory reporting resulting from those requirements. Developers are telling us they can spend less time chasing change and more time driving their companies forward.”

ALM for the Enterprise Strategy

While Serena Dimensions 10 is the anchor of its ALM product line and strategy, all of Serena’s products and services are dedicated to enabling organizations to control change so they can reduce cost, improve quality, and eliminate risk. Other Serena products include Serena TeamTrack, Serena Mariner, Serena ChangeMan ZMF, Serena PVCS Version Manager™, and Serena Composer™.