Serena Software announced last month their new change and release management capabilities for its Orchestrated IT solution set. The newly enhanced solutions provide essential tooling for IT shops that are embracing the DevOps movement, as well as those that are simply looking to increase their change and release cadence.

DevOps has become a primary driver for IT organizations that are delivering Revenue Applications (RevApps), software applications that directly transact customer activity and bring in considerable revenue to the enterprise. The speed and frequency with which RevApps get enhanced directly impacts how quickly the business can respond to customer requests, competitive moves and changing market conditions.

Serena’s response is a series of enhancements that 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, as well as other enhancements that significantly reduce development and operations hassles.

The new capabilities available in version 4.5 of Serena’s Orchestrated IT solutions include:

Self-Service Provisioning of Environments

  • A new on-demand self-service portal enables developers and QA teams to immediately spin up, and later tear down, the environments they need for application development and testing.

  • Developer self-service capabilities free IT operations staff from manual provisioning so they can focus on IT infrastructure and performance improvements for the business.

Release Automation Targets Now include Windows Azure and VMware ESX/ESXi

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

  • Serena Release Automation now includes advanced load-balancing and failover  capabilities simplifying enterprise adoption.

  • Serena Release Automation is now localized into Japanese.

Hassle-Free Capturing Of Change Request Actuals

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

  • Business change requests can be easily tracked from planning through to development.

 “DevOps allows IT to become truly agile,” commented Greg Hughes, president and CEO of Serena Software. “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 Revenue Applications.”

“Revenue Applications play a critical role in the success of business today.  This is true in traditional, as well as newer market segments,” said Rich Ptak, managing partner and cofounder of Ptak/Noel. “Serena’s latest release of its Orchestrated IT solutions goes right to the heart of DevOps.  By streamlining change and release management it helps businesses keep these important apps current and operating to deliver exceptional customer experience.”

The new Serena 4.5 Orchestrated IT solutions will be generally available now. Pricing starts at $12,500 for 250 users.