For my first trip to mainland China I was lucky enough to go to Shenzhen. Just a short ferry ride from Hong Kong, Shenzhen is an ultra-modern city with incredible architecture, broad boulevards and super-efficient infrastructure.

I was in China to work with a technology component manufacturer who was looking to overhaul their development processes and toolsets. They need

Well it has been a wonderful three days here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The customers are happy and that means I am happy.

xChange is well and truly back!

We started planning xChange 2011 in November 2010 and thousands of hours have gone in to making it such a success. A massive amount of credit goes to the xChange team led by Jen Melvin, Serenity Thompson, Shirley Miller, Vickie Schira, Kath McKeever and Renee Scullin whose tireless efforts delivered up one of the most intensive, content rich, solution focused and fun events I have ever seen.

Attendee reactions were positive, upbeat and excited with many customers ready to sign up for next year’s conference. We

Day three:

Today was all breakout sessions in each of the 6 tracks from 8:00 to 3:00 pm. This year the tracks were organized around our solution sets:

• The Orchestrated ALM track looked at all the solutions as part of the overall Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and included some great customer sessions featuring CVS and Carefirst who have gone a long way to full automating their development process.
• In the IT Service Management and Serena Business Manager track we showed off all the great new innovations in SBM and in Serena Service Manager. This was the most popular track by far with every session having more than 80 people in

Day two:

We started off day 2 with the Serena Innovation Awards, or “The Douggies”. They were presented by our Founder Doug Troxel to those companies that had done something extraordinary with our solutions.

The Application Development Award went to Dale Clark of Carefirst for the end-to-end automation of their SDLC which included the integration of Clarity, Quality Center, Dimensions CM, ChangeMan ZMF, Systems Architect, SharePoint, PeopleSoft and Beeline.

The Release Management Award was given to Prakash Balakrishnan of Nationwide Mutual Insurance for the remarkable

Day one:

John got us off to a roaring start with the Serena Vision and Direction and brought all the customers up to date with the latest developments. He introduced us all to the easy to understand and easy tell message:

Orchestrated Apps + Orchestrated Ops = Orchestrated IT

He spoke about customer successes and convinced the crowd that we are back to the core businesses that make us so successful.

The “Serena Players” took us through the End-to-End Demo and

As many of you who use our mainframe products know, George Pipka has been at the center of our mainframe customer support team for several years. Along with development and product management leadership George has been developing the content for the mainframe track at this year’s conference. I spoke with George from his home in Canada to find out what is in store this year.

KP: Thank you George for taking the time to talk to me. I know the mainframe track is one of the most popular each year. What’s exciting for

Christian Christophoridis, who is this year’s Serena Eagle Award for most valuable contribution to customers and an industry-recognized thought leader on Requirements Management, is leading the team developing the Demand and Requirements Management track content for xChange 2011, Serena’s annual global user conference from September 19-21 in Las Vegas, Nevada. On the phone from Germany a little while ago, he told me about the Demand and Requirements track.

KP: I know you are a strong advocate of the importance of the requirements phase.

It’ll be here before you know it – xChange 2011, Serena’s global user conference from September 19-21 in Las Vegas, Nevada!  I just got an advanced look into the “SBM and IT Process Automation” track from Amita Abraham, group product marketing manager for Serena Business Manager (SBM) and Serena Service Manager.

KP: So, our last poll indicates that more than 60% of those registered for the conference want to know what’s new and exciting with SBM. What do you

Today I had the good fortune to meet with Ashley Owen.  As part of the Serena product team that directs and develops our Orchestrated ALM product solutions, he is ideally placed to define the “Orchestrating the Entire Application Lifecycle” track content for xChange, Serena’s annual user conference from September 19-21, 2011.  Here is how our conversation went.

KP: This is a pretty big track; it covers the entire lifecycle from demand

Record breaking: With over 200 submissions, this year’s “call for speakers” was the largest ever crop of topic suggestions for xChange 2011, the annual Serena customer conference to be held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada from September 19-21.

Over the last six weeks the product teams have been working through the submissions and their task has been very difficult. So many excellent presentations and so few speaking slots. Indeed we have actually opened up additional space to accommodate more of the ideas.

This week the top 80 suggestions went online and you can now