Application release management specialist Serena has followed up a week of user and customer engagement exercises at its xChange symposium by launching some tangible new product releases. The company is working to show the public that it has moved from being a mere applications specialist to being a fully blown developer Operations (devOps) business.
Unlike legacy IT Service Management (ITSM) tools, which exhibit forms and data-driven characteristics, Serena Service Manager hinges on what the company insists is a "process-based approach" to delivering IT services. Along with a unified service portal and integrated service dashboards, Serena Service Manager's elevator pitch (if you will) is the function to sync people, processes, and services to improve overall visibility into incidents, problems, and changes.
Integrated with the above tool, Serena also announced Serena Release Manager 2, a new visual enterprise release calendar for both application development and IT operations. The new solutions build on Serena's Orchestrated Application Delivery product strategy unveiled last year. The company's Service Manager product is said to be the only ITSM offering on the market today that leverages Serena's process-based approach. Linking people with process in orchestrated service management, Serena says it can tackle the challenges around flexibility, visibility, and usability inherent in legacy ITSM solutions.
With Serena Service Manager — which can be deployed from the cloud or on-premises — IT organizations can lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for their service desk solutions and speed up issue resolution with full visibility across the service lifecycle. This improves user satisfaction and reduces "backdoor" requests to IT for support by providing a unified, easy-to-navigate end user service request portal.
"Serena Service Manager's process-oriented approach offers a degree of transparency, tailorability, and ease of adoption that will make it popular. Serena Service Manager also offers a path for those who have yet to embrace ITIL, have struggled with adoption, or have reached a point of inertia, as well as sites where the process-oriented approach is attractive," said Martin Gandar, industry analyst.
With Serena Release Manager 2, Development and Operations teams have a new option when planning and documenting releases through a visual calendar. Both application and operational updates in the release calendar are automatically communicated to all impacted stakeholders for improved collaboration, streamlined deployment times, and increased governance.
"The new Serena Service Manager solution builds on our customers' success in orchestrating their IT service processes. Serena Service Manager is something the ITSM market hasn't seen before: a process-based, visually configurable system. It also includes a cleanly designed end user portal, which presents IT to the business in very attractive fashion," said David Hurwitz, senior VP of worldwide marketing, Serena Software.
