Carl Theobald, SVP Products, has just taken the stage and is wearing his trademark, all black. After a brief introduction of who he is, he explains his change of focus to encompass R&D and Support and how that mix works to the benefit of the customer.
On to the Serena game plan. Carl quickly addresses the most common questions around the investment into ALM, Dimensions, etc. The answer is, YES, Serena is still focused as much as ever on those products. Furthermore, Carl went over how Business Mashups, Dimensions, and ZMF provides Demand Management, Incident Management, Defect Management, Change Management, and Release Management. Over the top of all this, Mariner brings visibility to the processes. Finally, Agile on Demand provides a means to manage the Agile development process.
Paul Dupuy takes the stage to demo the new Agile on Demand product. The application is very rich, employing drag and drop features, editing done in a push-button “edit” mode. Navigation around the application seems to be easy and intuitive. When working in the Release Planning View, the person can do some “what if” scenarios as needed to bring a schedule back into the green. Again, when looking at a sprint backlog you can move things around in a very Web 2.0 drag/drop fashion.
John Scumniotales has just sprinted to the stage, get it…sprint…to act as a scrum master. After logging into the application, the scrum master sees things in a slightly different views. Another interesting view of the application that John goes into is the “card wall”, which simulates a real “card wall” but in a globally collaborative way. Since many people are new to Agile, the Agile on Demand product has a collaborative contextual help system. This is where the Valtech relationship really plays out. Valtech is the expert on the process and as such can be reached through a live “ask the expert” feature that actually puts the user on the phone with a Valtech rep to answer your questions. This is very similar in concept to Apple’s Genius Bar, where you schedule an appointment and get help with your issue.
Now John is showing how a senior manager can see a dashboard of activities. Again, the charts are nice, rich and easy to understand.
Serena is its own customer, so Carl is now going to show a real production view of the internal instance of Mariner. The audience gets to actually see high level information on initiatives that are in progress, so if there were any questions around ZMF, Agile, etc., they are now dispelled. Carl has now transitioned to show the left side “tree” navigation which emphasizes that are tracked internally. Carl continues on with showing the various screens which are extremely informational.
Next stop, comparisons between previous versions of the applications to now. This is a pretty interesting comparison that shows where the company has been and where it’s going. Carl is now showing the next generation of the Mashup Exchange. Very cool interface that includes things like tag clouds, ratings, etc. Not mentioned when it’s coming out, but looks like a big improvement over the current Mashup Exchange.
Mir Derakhshan is going through the Dimensions demo by showing how the developer might work inside of Eclipse. What’s really slick here, is that there is a tie through Business Mashups to route the work to the developer, but the developer doesn’t have to leave Eclipse, everything is at the developers fingertips. All actions are very fast as they point out, there is no replication so you don’t have the normal delays associated with that.
At the beginning of the year, Serena announced there would be three new products launched as SaaS offerings. To date, Serena is on schedule; launching Mariner and Business Mashups in the cloud. Agile on Demand will be launched later in the year. Further updates have been made to serena.com, the support site, and knowledgebase. Peter Sianchuk is introduced to demo the new sites. First and foremost, single sign on (SSO) makes it easier for a user to use the site by not needing to log on frequently, always a HUGE plus! Peter moves on to the KnowledgeBase (KB) system and how it’s been completely revamped and updated, to the tune of > 35,000 documents. The interface, like most of the Serena interfaces, has been given a completely new look/feel that is much more fresh. Along with a better UI, information that was previously hard to get at is now much easier to view and use. The results of the new solution, over 10,000 hits with a 94% hit rate, meaning that people are finding what they need more often. Furthermore, 18% fewer cases have been filed and fixes have been delivered 35% faster!
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