Serena Steps Up Change and Release Cadence

Serena Software has pushed out an update to the change and release management capabilities for its orchestrated IT DevOps software products. New tools have been brought online to increase the change and release cadence in software development shops.

The firm is trying coin the term Revenue Applications (RevApps) as a primary target for DevOps technologies. These are the software applications that directly transact customer activity and bring in revenue to the enterprise.

Serena's new tools provide developers with self-service provisioning of environments (to go with previously available self-service application deployment), more cloud and virtualized infrastructure deployment targets, improved resource management, and demand planning.

The new capabilities available in version 4.5 of Serena's new Orchestrated IT solutions include self-service provisioning of environments. This is a new on-demand self-service portal intended to enable developers and QA teams to spin up, and later tear down, the environments they need for application development and testing.

New developer self-service capabilities are also here to free IT operations staff from manual provisioning so they can focus on IT infrastructure and performance improvements for the business.

NOTE: Target deployment environments now include cloud platforms Windows Azure, and Amazon EC2, along with leading virtualized environments VMware ESX/ ESXi.

Development team managers can now capture the costs of specific tasks and link them to approved change requests. Low-impact capture and roll-up of the time spent on change request activities allows assessment of the resources utilized by a project.

Greg Hughes, president and CEO of Serena Software, stated that, "Serena's enhanced change and release management capabilities allow Dev to exploit more self-service functions and Ops to release at the rapid cadence required of today's enterprise cash cows, Revenue Applications."