The heart of xChange 2012, Serena’s Global User Conference, is the breakout sessions.  But the soul of xChange is the customer presentations. I am thrilled to announce that, as of today, you can submit your ideas for presentations online through an SBM workflow (of course!).

This year we are looking for topics in the

Today Serena announced that Ultimate Software, a leading provider of human capital cloud management solutions for global business, selected Serena Release Automation, powered by Nolio, as its application deployment solution for Development. 

Ultimate Software has thousands of servers and multiple deployments running daily from pre-production to production. At such a fast pace and high volume of application changes, it’s absolutely critical that they employ a streamlined process-approach to release automation. 

Previously, Ultimate Software was using Symantec Altiris but decided to evaluate other deployment solutions in search of one that

As Agile development becomes more the norm, release management has become more of a major bottleneck, delaying key application deployments at a time when businesses rely on software for competitive advantage and innovation. Now more than ever, an increasing emphasis is put on software release and provisioning strategies and automation to help optimize business agility and cost-effective software

I recently heard an industry analyst state that IT is locally brilliant but globally stupid, while referring to the release management process. He drew an analogy and asked the question: are we rewarding the fireman or the arsonist?

Interesting question. Many of our customers report that application-centric deployments into pre-production and production environments are largely manual and script driven, with much dependence and reliance on the few resources currently tasked with defining and executing deployment tasks and activities. There comes a point with deployment when

I just met with Steven Cronin from our German support team about the Release Management track at Serena’s annual user conference, xChange 2011, from September 19-21 in Las Vegas.  Steven is leading a worldwide team of Serena experts who have built the Release Management conference agenda.

KP: Who should attend this track?

SC: Anyone interested in or responsible for deployment and release

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

Today, Serena Software announced that it has signed a multi-year OEM agreement with Nolio, the leader in application release automation. This is great news for our customers and partners because they can now get an industry-leading release automation solution directly from Serena with the full backing of our worldwide, award-winning customer support. With this agreement, Serena is delivering the first and only complete, end-to-end release management solution to the market. No other vendor, from either the App Dev or IT Ops segment, can match the comprehensive release management offering that we are announcing today.
The agreement brings together the best of ALM and release

I’m just back from a trip to Australia where I conducted a number of Release Management seminars.  There was tremendous interest in release management in general and an even more overwhelming interest in release automation.  A Delivery Manager from a large international insurance company approached me after one of the seminars.  We engaged in conversation about their release management process and discussed the increasing complexity of application tiers and infrastructure environments.

This inevitably led to a white board where he proceeded to sketch their release process and draw

I just met with a Fortune 1000 customer who recently implemented Serena’s Release Management solution with great success. This leading provider of information services is using Serena’s Release Vault and Release Automation to automate deployment of their mission critical applications from development through to the production environment.  I wanted to share some of the business benefits being realized.

Historically, it took 30 to 60 days to release a

How would you rate your company’s release management process?  Are you in need of ideas to improve release flow and drive efficiency?  Do you want more release visibility and speed?  If you’re nodding your head, then keep reading.  Serena recently hosted a webinar entitled Five Ways to Streamline Release Management.  We featured independent research firm Forrester Research, Inc. principal analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond, who is a leading