I am very pleased to announce that Serena’s Release Automation tool has recently been named a winner in this year’s Network Products Guide Awards in the Application Delivery category. This award showcases our continued charge as a leader in the adoption of Release Management and DevOps. This is the third consecutive year that a Serena solution has been a part of the awards finalists’

It is not easy to be selected as a speaker for xChange, Serena’s annual user conference. I always feel sorry for the many excellent presentation ideas we have to turn away, but I am so excited to think about the ones that were chosen for xChange13 from September 16-18 in Miami. This year’s list is more impressive than ever before.

We have a bumper crop of customer presentations, which we’ll announce next week.  These are my personal favorite sessions

In our recent Mainframe Virtual User Group (VUG) meeting, we highlighted the latest features in the ChangeMan ZMF Client Pack. John Skelton, Principal Developer from the ChangeMan ZMF Development team and frequent presenter at VUGs and the annual Serena Software xChange User Conference, stepped the attendees through an overview and an awesome demo of the latest and greatest ZMF Client

Release automation is a hot topic.  This is pretty exciting to witness since I have worked in the industry for a long time and crafted quite a few deployment solutions by hand.  However, there may be too much focus on release automation and not enough on release management holistically.  Pushing bits to servers with a small amount of process management around it is where most release automation tools stop.

Process management, visualization and traceability are all critical, especially as the number of releases

Last week I was in Austin attending my second DevOpsDays event of the year and it had a very different feel to DevOpsDays London.  It was the biggest DevOpsDays event yet with over 300 attendees and a reasonable amount of sponsors, Serena being one of them.

DevOpsDays Austin focused very much on culture, much to the frustration of some but I believe it is the right choice.  Unless you are fortunate enough to be in an environment that has a culture perfectly suited to DevOps, then focusing on technology alone will

Last week I was able to get the most out of my trip to Austin by attending Puppet Camp and then DevOpsDays.  Puppet Camp was a high quality event with great sessions.  The content was quite varied and really resonated with me.  I’ve noticed that the Puppet community is undergoing phenomenal growth and I’m impressed with the level of community engagement.  Initiatives such as ask.puppetlabs.com and Puppet Forge make community involvement easier than ever.  A couple of highlights from the event…

@GrandmaHenri, a technical writer at Puppet Labs, presented a session on how to document modules on the Puppet Forge.  This should keep the quality of

I just got back from attending a few back-to-back events.  One of which was ChefConf 2013. It was my first ChefConf and it was a really high energy event with a wide variety of speakers and attendees.  I chose to focus on the sessions covering culture, but there were many great sessions.

The first memorable session was “Scaling systems configuration at Facebook,” presented by Phil Dibowitz from Facebook.  A larger-than-life rock and roll guy if ever I saw one, Phil did an awesome session on why Chef was the appropriate tool for use at Facebook.  I think Phil probably made Chef support staff cringe when he discussed “tweaking” the Chef libraries to meet his needs, but he did add a

My favorite event of the year is the Defence Information Conference, held annually in the UK.  It brings together the leading Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Uniformed Services IT executives to talk about a range of topics. This year’s theme was about “Valuing Information as an Asset.”

I was honored to give a brief keynote and chose the value of data

Have you heard the news?  Serena just launched a raft of new capabilities that help our customers embrace DevOps.  Release automation targets now include VMware ESX and ESXi, plus Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure, to go along with an expansive existing set that includes Windows, Unix, Linux, Mainframe and Amazon’s cloud platform EC2.  Developers have great new self-service capabilities, now including

As a release manager, CM manager, configuration manager, help desk manager, administrator, engineer, architect, project manager or analyst, one of the biggest challenges in attending any user conference is getting your manager’s approval. Some upper-level managers view conferences as an excuse for going out and having a good time. Therefore, you need to sell your manager on the value of user conference participation. Here are some helpful hints on getting the approval you need to