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Serena Software Ships Industry’s First Change Governance Solution for Application Lifecycle Management

LAS VEGAS, NV, Serena xChange 2006 Conference — September 12, 2006 — Serena Software, Inc., the Change Governance™ leader, today announced Serena® Dimensions™ 10, the first Change Governance solution for distributed application lifecycle management (ALM). Unveiled at Serena’s worldwide user conference, Dimensions 10 automatically unifies the software change lifecycle with a single integrated process, to ensure that enterprise applications meet business requirements on time, cost-effectively, and with full auditability. Cross-platform and highly scalable, Dimensions 10 can easily address any enterprise development environment, enabling IT to deliver greater value to the business in the face of constant change.

According to a September 2006 Forrester Research report, “IT organizations spend billions of dollars a year on development lifecycle tools that don’t play well together…But tomorrow’s ALM platforms will do much better by providing common services to practitioner tools.” Serena’s approach is recognized as offering a single vendor, single repository ALM platform that also addresses multivendor environments.[1]

“The release of Serena Dimensions 10 is a watershed event for our customers and the ALM industry. It brings unprecedented integration, automation, visibility, and traceability to the development process and puts businesses in control of changes occurring throughout their enterprises,” said Mark Woodward, CEO and president, Serena Software. “Serena’s Change Governance solution for ALM is the culmination of 25 years of experience meeting the needs of some of the world’s leading organizations.”

Only Serena Dimensions 10 automatically unifies the software change lifecycle – from inception to deployment – with one integrated process model and one data repository to optimize application development under conditions of continuous change. It seamlessly integrates multiple platforms, multiple roles, and global locations – and it leverages the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) to embrace customer investments in third-party tools. As a result, enterprises can control application changes across IT and business units to provide full auditability, timely response, and measurable business impact.

“We are thrilled with Serena’s new offering in Dimensions 10. The new platform will improve productivity and quality through a single, integrated system for requirements, change, configuration, build and deployment management,” said Jim Hendricks, manager of quality and process improvement at AutoZone, based in Memphis, Tenn.

Change Governance Solutions Drive Next-Generation ALM
Projected to grow to a $3.3 billion market by 2009[2], the ALM market has evolved from ad hoc, home grown tools and processes for managing change into a critical success factor for any business that relies on software systems to achieve business objectives. This evolution is largely driven by the volume, scale, and urgency of today’s business pressures, including competition, demand for increased innovation, globalization, outsourcing, offshoring, and new regulations. 

“Up to now, many of the planning and control elements of the development lifecycle have not been well integrated. This situation often leads to outages and lower productivity in the enterprise,” said Jim Duggan, research vice president, Research Group, Gartner. “Companies need well coordinated, end-to-end process control throughout the application development lifecycle – from inception through requirements to deployment – to govern change successfully across the enterprise. An effective, process-centric approach has to accommodate the reality of today’s development teams that may be geographically dispersed, working in a variety of technologies and on a variety of platforms.”

Now, with Serena’s Change Governance solution for ALM, developers have a closed-loop, process-centric approach to controlling enterprise-wide software change. Dimensions 10 lets users continuously manage and execute change requests and events through a shared, transparent, and comprehensive process framework. As a result, IT departments are able to streamline developer productivity and audit each step of the process, improving the speed and quality of enterprise application development. The new role-based dashboard in Dimensions 10 provides visibility across the entire application lifecycle with comprehensive reporting and compliance enforcement.

“Serena has delivered a very robust solution with the new Dimensions 10 release and we look forward to upgrading,” said Gary Soule, manager of IT application lifecycle management at Premera Blue Cross, based in Mountlake Terrace, WA. “With a user-friendly interface, dashboard capabilities, IDE integration, project views, and other great features, Serena will continue to provide real value to Premera by further mitigating risk, providing excellent traceability and streamlining software configuration management.”

Serena Dimensions 10 Turns Change Into Business Advantage
Serena Dimensions 10 is a Change Governance solution for ALM that enables users to visualize the impact of proposed changes before they happen, orchestrate processes and policies to ensure controlled, automated workflow across multiple personas or teams, and enforce IT-wide adherence to best practices and regulatory standards. Highlights include:

• Single Integrated Process: Dimensions 10 integrates requirements, change, configuration, build, and deployment management through a single process model and unified data store to enable more efficient, cost-effective, and rapid development of applications with full traceability and auditability each step of the way.
• Enterprise Scale: Dimensions 10 is the industry’s only cross-platform solution to leverage existing investments in hardware platforms (distributed, mainframe, and Web) as well as operating systems, technologies, and databases that can scale globally to integrate multiple sites, multiple project teams, and individual roles, supporting outsourced and offshore development initiatives.

• Complete Lifecycle Visibility: Dimensions 10 features Serena Command Center™, a role-based dashboard that lets customers analyze performance metrics for projects across each development stage, putting all business and IT leaders in a better position to deliver strategic business value.

• Developer Usability: Dimensions 10 offers wide support for third-party tools, including modeling and testing tools, as well as native integration with popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), such as Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio.Net, and native Windows Explorer integration. These features allow developers to work with the tools and within the environments they know and love, increasing user choice and productivity.
• Easy Installation and Administration: Dimensions 10 is available via a single CD for quick and easy installation of all components on a modular basis, simplifying large-scale deployment and speeding time to application value.

“By leveraging Serena’s unique focus on software change, we have built a highly responsive framework that helps organizations control change across the enterprise and reach business goals,” said Carl Theobald, Serena’s senior vice president of research and development. “The key failing of traditional ALM offerings is that customers have been forced to write scripts to fill gaps in functionality and to provide linkages between various process stages. With Serena Dimensions 10, customers no longer have to face the cost, error, and exposure to risk in terms of compliance and regulatory reporting resulting from those requirements. Developers are telling us they can spend less time chasing change and more time driving their companies forward.”

Serena’s Change Governance Strategy
While Serena Dimensions 10 is the anchor of its ALM product line and strategy, all of Serena’s products and services are dedicated to enabling organizations to control change so they can reduce cost, improve quality, and eliminate risk. Other products in Serena’s Change Governance offering include Serena TeamTrack®, Serena ChangeMan® ZMF, Serena PVCS® Version Manager™, and Serena Composer™.

In addition, Serena is a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation and leads the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) Project, dedicated to lowering the cost and complexity associated with the integration and interoperability of multiple vendor tools throughout the application lifecycle. Serena Change Governance offerings fully embrace ALF as its core multivendor interoperability platform.

Pricing and Availability
Serena Dimensions 10 is available now worldwide direct from Serena and from authorized partners. For a mid- to large-sized enterprise, entry level pricing for Serena Dimensions 10 averages $100,000 (perpetual license). Interested parties should contact Serena at 1-800-547-7827 or www.serena.com.

About Serena Software, Inc.
Serena Software, the Change Governance™ leader, provides software and services to more than 15,000 organizations around the world—including 96 of the Fortune 100 and 90 of the Global 100. Recognized by IDC as the largest software provider focused exclusively on change, Serena offers a new approach to change—Change Governance—that enables businesses to efficiently, consistently, and successfully control change across the enterprise. Serena helps companies capitalize on change to achieve transformative business results. Serena has more than 750 employees worldwide and is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific. For more information, please visit www.serena.com.

Serena, TeamTrack, PVCS, and ChangeMan are registered trademarks of Serena Software, Inc. Change Governance, Command Center, Dimensions, Version Manager and Composer are trademarks of Serena Software, Inc. All other products or company names are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright © 2006 SERENA Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.