I just completed the App Vision World Tour in six major cities: Los Angeles, New York, Milan, Paris and London. Tom Murphy, industry analyst, joined me and presented Gartner’s view of application development over the next 3 to 5 years. I spoke about our Orchestrated ALM approach: being a process-centric way of thinking about development. And in each city we had a local customer, Wells Fargo, Western Southern Life and BBVA Compass talk about their use of Serena’s products.
Gartner’s presentation was very interesting. According to their research, application development is at a cusp. Old ways of doing things creaking because of new demands businesses are placing on IT: more accountability, stakeholder involvement and transparency. IT has to deliver faster, to more platforms, with greater accuracy and to use leading edge technologies with brand new tools and methods. The added complexity introduces more risk and uncertainty.
According to Tom’s research the cure for developments ills are well known: detecting defects earlier, decreasing project size and tracking activity with metrics. One surprising conclusion Tom Murphy asserts is that Release Management has become a critical battleground in terms of automation. He tells a story of one client who has a 542 line Excel spreadsheet containing the details of how to release a particular piece of code. The complexity of releases, massive interdependence of systems, velocity of change in infrastructure components all make release management one of the most sophisticated problems we have that is crying out for automation.
These points dovetailed perfectly with Serena’s Orchestrated Application Delivery story. For 30 years we’ve delivered process-centric solutions from one end of the lifecycle to the other. In collaboration with a large number of our customers we have connected our solutions through Demand to the Development to Delivery (D2D) lifecycle using end-to-end process automation based on the Serena Orchestrator platform powered by Serena Business Manager.
This automated ALM enables real-time information and metrics for indicators that Tom suggested IT management is starved of. Supporting both waterfall and Agile methodologies it delivers code faster. The solutions allow for process optimization eliminating rework and driving the detection of errors earlier in the lifecycle.
We need to get end-to-end connectivity between and amongst our people, processes and tools. Otherwise we will continue to waste time and money by doing unnecessary work, having manual processes, duplicating effort because we either don’t trust and/or don’t communicate.
To learn more about Serena’s Orchestrated Application Delivery, click on the image below to watch the video.
