News from Serena

After meeting Serena in Las Vegas and writing an article about the xChange event, Simonetta Radice from Citigate Italia contacted us in March for a follow-up on current Serena developments. Matt DiMaria (in the picture together with Manuel and Carl Theobald, SVP Products), the global Marketing responsible, informed us about Serena's news during a phone interview. Here are some of the points touched that might be of interest for the change, project and portfolio management domain.

1. Since the last interview, important changes have happened for Serena, could you please describe for our readers what has been going on?

Last week (the 26^th of February a.n.) we announced a new CEO, his name is Jeremy Burton. Serena had a temporary, interim chief executive for a period of about two months - Michael Capellas. From the last time we talked, at the xChange Conference - Las Vegas launch, we have completed an acquisition of a PPM (Project and Portfolio Management) technology solution. We acquired a company named Pacific Edge Software, the featured product there is called Mariner, a highly regarded product even though it was a relatively small company, so now a much bigger company is behind a very strong product.

2. What drove the acquisition?

It was a combination of things; one is that, of course, the majority of our customers used the products in support to their software projects. Typically the tools we offer are used by the development teams and their management for delivery of custom applications. PPM provides strong project management capabilities like managing the time, resources and the delivery of functionality in the context of a project, but on the portfolio side it also includes cost information, demand management information, to capture requests coming in from the business, to facilitate IT making more informed decisions about applications' development and activities within the development process, so it is a very complementary and very important acquisition for us.

3. Could you please introduce the Mariner PPM solution to our Italian readers? In your opinion what are the key features and why are they important for the Italian and European market?

In the Italian market, like software markets all around the world, companies are increasingly making decisions to offshore or outsource portions of the development process, whether it is maintenance activity or documentation or more strategic new capabilities being added in the software development process. It is very difficult for large companies to make informed business decisions and gain visibility to very distributed development activities. Historically development was done where the entire team, lets say, would be in one building or one area so that they can communicate very easily with one another. If the manager wanted to know what was going on he could easily call a meeting and bring everybody together and discuss it. Now you have distributed teams all over the world but they still need to assure schedules and delivery on time and on budget. But without having some automation it is extremely difficult and very costly to do it, moreover, it is difficult to evaluate development teams. With the portfolio management capability the organization has the capability to assess quality goals, assess performance against budget, and so forth and compare what a group would say and how they are performing relative to another, so they can make better decision for allocation new work that comes in. Then within the projects themselves there is a need for collaboration among the developing teams. We at Serena answer this need with Dimensions that provides for end to end life cycle management capabilities in a single tool. In conclusion, portfolio management mainly is about making more informed decisions, while application life-cycle management is about making implementation and or execution of these decisions.

4. Dimension 10 was supposed to be an integrated solution centred on Change management, how does the PPM solution impact on this orientation? Is the focus of Serena still on Change Governance?

It is very much in the same spirit. The PPM solution provides support at CEO and decision maker level that relates to a project or the needs of the business. By this it is complementary to our change government vision and to our general strategy within applications development. It probably increases our available market in the sense that process management capabilities, portfolio management can be done outside, strictly speaking, the software development process, could be virtually for any type of project, but we are not really focused on that, we see the benefits in the core market development arena.

5. Are you planning a full integration of Mariner with Serena Dimensions 10, maybe in order to provide an all round decision support framework for the IT departments and professionals?

We are working very hard on that. But, at the moment, being an acquired technology, it functions and competes successfully standalone. We will continue to sell it as a stand alone; of course we see great opportunities to incorporate some of its functionality in the Serena products and making it very seriously part of our product family.

6. Is this integration a step towards creating a decision-support framework for IT departments?

No, not really. We will stay focused on the portfolio and project area.

7. What impact does the acquisition have on final customers?

In the end it is providing the customer with one vendor to work with across a whole range of application development requirements. Our customers have more strategic support for making decisions about portfolio management or requirements management or change management, so they can work with one vendor that is Serena.

8. Does the acquisition of Pacific Edge and the integration of its PPM solutions mean that Serena is no longer available for other collaborations in this direction, for example with Microsoft?

No, not at all, we continue to work very closely with Microsoft. Even the Mariner offering has full bidirectional interoperability with Microsoft Project so if the customer has adopted Project they can still capture all project information and pass it into Mariner were we can help do the resource assessment, the financial impact assessment, and so on, so it is very complimentary and we will continue the integration.

9. In this period, not only Serena has grown in terms of solutions offered, but also you have a new CEO; what does this mean for Serena's market strategy and product offer? What are the new goals of Serena?

We are very fortunate to have Jeremy Burton coming from Symantec, he was running a very significant part of Symantec business, and has also experience with Veritas and Oracle. We are very fortunate to have him leading the team and you will see in time the focus continuing in the application development world and commitment to being the leading vendor in this particular area.

10. For an external observer, it seems that Serena is changing CEOs quite often, is this a strategy for testing you change solutions, or a strategy for overcoming market turbulence or there is no strategy at all?

Serena has only had three CEOs. The most recent change was determined by the decision of Woodward to leave Serena. Silver Lake Partners, the company that owns Serena, as they were looking for a new CEO, asked Michael Capellas, a world famous CEO, to serve in a temporary capacity, and he was announced in exactly that fashion, as an interim CEO as we were searching for a fulltime CEO. This process was completed in a short amount of time, so no disruption in our planning activities or our go to market activities. We just finished our financial year, although I am unable to share with you the results of our financial year, what I can tell you is that Serena is a very strong company, a very profitable company we believe very well positioned to continue as a leader in the application development market place.