Serena Moves into SaaS, Project Management, and Agile Application Development

Here is a cross post from the App Gap blog. Serena Software is going further into the on demand space by providing three new SaaS solutions this year– Serena® Mariner® (Project and Portfolio Management), Serena Business Mashups, and Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools. They also recently launched the Serena Business Mashup Blog to serve as an enterprise mashup resource center. I have written about their business mashups tools before (Enterprise 2.0 Mashups from Serena Software), now they are also moving into the project management and application development space with the PPM and ALM offerings. I spoke last week with René Bonvanie, the SVP of worldwide marketing, partner programs and online services at Serena Software, who outlined their plans for 2008.

First, Serena will make one of its new offerings, Serena Mariner, available on demand within the next 30 days. Serena Mariner provides a transparent enterprise 2.0 approach to project status reporting and metrics. Mariner will also incorporate the ability to create mashups to support the project oversight process, providing the ability to link to enterprise data stores such as SAP for relevant project information. It was named a leader in Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) tools by Forrester (see The Forrester Wave™: Project Portfolio Management Tools, Q4 2007). Serena purchased Mariner from Pacific Edge last year and converted it for SaaS deployment.

Next, Serena Business Mashups will be offered as a totally SaaS solution in June. The Serena Mashup Composer has been as a SaaS solution but the Business Mashup Server Server is currently offered as an on premise application. This summer the server will also be available on demand. They will preview the solution in March to allow customers to develop solutions for the June release. While Serena provides tools for others to develop mashups, they are also developing mashups on their own. They will license all the mashups they develop for free through the Creative Commons license to help spread the general use of mashups. This is a good example of the “freeconomics” that people like Chris Anderson are writing about.

Serena has been involved with application development tools for some time. In the fall, it moves into the Agile development space with an on demand offering. The wikipedia defines Agile software development as “a conceptual framework for software engineering that promotes development iterations throughout the life-cycle of the project.” The idea is to break up a large development job into many small parts in contrast to the more traditional waterfall method. This allows for more iterative development and is more consistent with the general philosophy of web 2.0. At the same time it requires lots of coordination that the Serena tool is designed to support. John Scumniotales, who one of the originators of the Agile method is working with Serena on this offering. The tool will include wiki support and other web 2.0 features.

Serena has also recently launched the Serena Business Mashup blog. It is designed to be an enterprise mashup resource center. It covers mashup examples, opportunities, challenges, business value, trends, technology issues, and more

Serena is trying to make the maximum use of SaaS for its own internal operations. I already covered the switch to Facebook for their intranet, (Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet). They are also using the following SaaS tools:

• OpSource for infrastructure services
• Aria Systems for billing
• MarketBright for marketing automation
• Salesforce.com for sales force optimization
• Omniture for web analytics
• Postini for anti-spam
• Brightcove for proprietary marketing tool, MashupTV
• Mediaroom for press room
• LucidEra for business analytics
• HiveLive for online communities

This is a good example of how a mid-size company such as Serena, can switch to a mostly on demand mode for its operations through the wide variety of tools available today. This is a market where I think it makes the most sense. These companies often have more flexibility than the larger firms with heavy infrastructure investments. The lower financial entry point also makes the switch easier. Larger enterprises should also look in this direction before they spend major sums on up grades to on premise applications.