Serena Software Beefs Up ALM Suite To Improve App Development

On Monday Serena Software announced new features for its Orchestrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) suite that manages application development from the requirements stage through building and testing an app to its deployment. New to Orchestrated ALM, Serena says, is a dashboard that lets people involved in a project view the whole project from end to end.

ALM is the process software developers follow to build an application. It begins at the requirements, or demand, stage, where teams define in detail what the application is expected to do. The development stage is where the software is written, code is edited and the application is tested to make sure it runs right and fulfills the requirements. The third stage is deployment, where the application is distributed and made available to end users, and then is maintained with updates as needed.

Serena is now offering an updated version of its Dimensions Requirements Manager, version 11, a Web-based tool that, for the first time, includes a Protoype Composer. The company has also introduced a new version of its Development Management Suite for the development phase of a project.

It's an enterprise-class solution for developing applications by incorporating a variety of software development tools and development platforms. The new Orchestrated ALM Dashboard manages the end-to-end process, giving IT professionals a wide view of the whole project, says David Hurwitz, senior VP of worldwide marketing for Serena.

"What's important is to view application delivery as a business process, recognizing that there are different teams involved, that many of the sub-processes are siloed, and that there is a disparate set of tools that are being used out there that most organizations want to leverage," Hurwitz says. "They don't want to rip and replace what they've got. They want to integrate those into an end-to-end process orchestration system."  For that reason, Orchestrated ALM works with a variety of software development programs, including HP Quality Center, Microsoft's Visual Studio, the Eclipse open source platform and others.One of the enterprises that uses Orchestrated ALM is CVS Caremark, a pharmacy benefit management service of the retail pharmacy chain CVS. The system allows Caremark to double the number of software releases it makes each year. Another customer, Caixa Geral de Depositos, a Portugese bank, says it has reduced errors in the production environment by 30 percent and errors in deployment by 50 percent.

Serena's main competitor in this space is IBM Rational but, despite IBM's size, Hurwitz says, Serena offers a better workflow process and better integration with those disparate software development tools that customers already use.

Pricing for the new Dimensions Requirements Manager starts at $50,000, and pricing for the new Development Management Suite starts at $75,000 (each for up to 20 users). The dashboard is included with either product.

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