The need for speed…
Last year, Serena CEO Greg Hughes coined the term “HRLE” or “Highly Regulated Large Enterprise.” HRLEs depend on the mainframe platform for business critical system. They rely on this platform because of its unrivalled strengths and virtues.
We developed ChangeMan ZMF version 8 with all of these things in mind:
- The need to move fast without breaking things
- The need to do more with less
Business agility; the ability to respond to disruption, whether internal or external without losing focus is why leading enterprises depend on ChangeMan ZMF every day.
ChangeMan ZMF delivers
The new release of ChangeMan ZMF, version 8.1, includes new code in support of over four hundred change requests from you. The prevailing theme of the release is of ease of administration, ease of upgrade and ease of installation. We introduced the HLLX platform, allowing customizations to be kept in an auxiliary area, coded in any LE language, so when you upgrade, you just recouple to the next release. It added the benefit of exposing these customizations to your IDEs and Client Pack components.
We followed up with 8.1.1, with two hundred more change requests, and 8.1.2 with another three hundred change requests. This makes version 8.x a significant step forward in the product focused on the improvements initiated by you.
That was then….
Back in the day, some HRLE’s had eight to ten ChangeMan ZMF administrators. Today most organizations are down to one or two administrators despite the fact that number of applications, dev teams and IT locations has escalated exponentially. Combine that with navigating through compliance issues, and security concerns and you really do need to move fast without breaking things.
With all of this focus on the administrator, Serena also began to take a ruthless look at ways to improve the developer experience. We cataloged, aggregated and prioritized change requests that pertained to improving how developers experience ChangeMan ZMF. I interviewed customers, pulled discussions from Serena Central and scrubbed our own enhancement and ideas backlog.
Micro Focus and Serena Software – better together
In the middle of this shift of focus for my development teams, Micro Focus came along. Much to our serendipity, developer experience is where Micro Focus have put their recent engineering emphasis. As I’ve mentioned before in VUGs and elsewhere, Serena and Micro Focus have been in the same space for 30 years, yet never competed. This is because our products have never been competitive, but instead have been very complimentary.
#iChange2016 Chicago
Consider Enterprise Developer for z, which was demonstrated both on the mainstage and in breakouts at iChange. That the two product teams were able to put this integration together in time for iChange, without smoke and mirrors is a testament to how well the products fit in with each other.
Micro Focus sent representatives from their Enterprise and Software Delivery and Test (SD&T) groups to give the attendees at iChange both broad and deep presentations into their solutions, and how easily and effectively they work with ChangeMan ZMF.
Now that the conference is behind us, the product teams are collaborating on the next wave of integrations. ZMF and Enterprise Test Server, Enterprise Sync, Enterprise Analyzer to name a few.
Look for some exciting developments in the coming months or contact us to find out more.
