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

This is the last in the “Customers Always Say it Best” series of postings. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have enjoyed listening again to our customers. Thank you for all the feedback. We will certainly be doing more of this as the year moves forward. For those of you asking where you can register to be part of xChange13, go to www.serena.com/xchange.

But, back to Mark Stewart and the incredible things

There is a term that has been floating around the internet in the past year or so which illustrates a profound change in how we need to think about applications and how they are released.

That word is “Appification”.

Think about how you use apps on your smartphone.  App updates don’t come on regular release schedules; they come when they are needed. The driver could be a fix for something that is broken or it could be in response to having fewer downloads of an app and

Serena looks forward to hosting a vibrant, interesting and breakout-session-rich Federal User Group at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on April 3^rd, 2013. This year’s agenda is directly driven by the feedback from Federal agencies, customers and partners.  So please mark your diaries and sign up

Continuous Delivery is all the rage for dev teams and the release management / application delivery marketplace.  And rightfully so, as it is the application delivery methodology that lets App Dev deliver the code.  It saves time and money as it cuts the time for applications to be delivered into production.

A key driver for Continuous Delivery has been the adoption of Agile as a development methodology.  Most of our long-term application lifecycle management (ALM) customers have implemented at least some agile development processes,

Think You Know Your Team?

When was the last time you sat down with your peers and had a discussion about their priorities? What drives your priorities and what drives those of your peers may be widely dissimilar. Time-to-market may be your watch word. Maybe up-time and availability are key for your colleague downstream and driving out costs for an associate upstream.

What if you could have a Leadership Priorities Matrix for everyone in your

We call our customer conference xChange because it is an opportunity to exchange ideas and insights. It is a once-a-year coming-together of the customer’s best and brightest with Serena’s leadership and development teams. We take time to learn from the customers as much as we have new information to impart.

In this 5-episode blog series I am going to introduce you to some of the key contributors that have helped shape and frame Serena’s direction. Through their experience and knowledge we have created leading solutions to businesses technology issues.

Our first contribution comes

In my last blog post, I wrote that the “7 Deadly Sins of IT Demand” are driving down business satisfaction with IT. Any of these sins can make it extremely challenging for IT to efficiently and quickly fulfill demand. Recognize any of them?

1. The Squeaky Wheel, who constantly harasses IT or escalates requests.
2. The Black Hole where good requests

We’re proud to announce that the significant advancements made to our Orchestrated IT solution set are now generally available.  Serena Orchestrated IT 4.0 was specially designed to help agile enterprises take full advantage of mobile, social and cloud capabilities.

For the Front Office, Development, and Operations, Serena Orchestrated IT 4.0 consists of Serena’s major solutions, including Serena Dashboard, Request Center, Demand Manager, Requirements Manager, Development Manager, Release Manager, and Service Manager.

Serena had a great turnout for the Mainframe xChange12 breakout sessions and the “xChange Again” webcast on October 4.  At xChange, our customers had many questions about the future of the mainframe.  In many respects, we are at the greatest crossroads in the history of the mainframe.  Three points were loud and clear from our customers.

1. Our customers are doing more with less.

With downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate restructuring, we have customers who now have only 2 or 3 ChangeMan ZMF administrators versus the 8