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 integration of their web-based business-policy management system with ChangeMan ZMF.
And the Process Automation Award was presented to Tony Mattravers of AgustaWestland for changing how spare parts were managed such that order confirmation times went from 6 weeks to 6 minutes.
Of course we heard from Doug a little about our Serena history and customers were really touched to see our founder still engaged.
Peter Sianchuk told the customers about the many ways we Ensure Customer Success from helping them develop a business case through Value Engineering, to our Services Organization with education and training offerings in the classroom and in the cloud, to the residency program and implementation and mentoring programs, to our Support Team’s extensive global coverage and rapid response times.
The most fun of the morning was the Rapid-Fire Customer Comment round where we had Dale Clark (Carefirst), Sheila Stephens (QBE FIRST) and Ken Vane (Navy Federal Credit Union) answer tough industry questions posed by David Hurwitz. They each had “Fact” or “Fiction” paddles and voted on questions such as “Release Management should be its own department and not report into Apps or Ops: fact or fiction?” or “More money can be saved by automating deployment than automating testing: fact or fiction?” The answers were lively, thought provoking and often very funny. The audience loved the interaction and were cheering for their favorite answers. Best answer of the sessions went to Sheila in response to “Getting Apps and Ops to collaborate is easy: fact or fiction?”, her answer, one word “Chocolate!”
And the last session of the day was an open forum for customers to ask the Serena Executive Team anything that came to mind. And ask they did with questions about licensing, stability of the company, commitment to our current path and product direction.
In the evening we had an event at Studio 54 with music from the 70’s and 80’s and we had guest celebrities attend including Andy Warhol (played by Carl Landers), John Travolta (played by Patrick Merritt) and the Village People (played to synchronized perfection by the Field Marketing team of Serenity Thompson, LeeAna Valkovschi, Marina Selepouchin and Jasmine Hakki).
