“Doug Serena, CIO,” a five-part docudrama chronicling a fictional team’s move to orchestrated IT to deliver value to the business, premiered on YouTube in support of Serena Software’s release today of a new and updated suite of tools for DevOps.
“We take a process-oriented view of IT, from routing requests to development and operations, then releasing software into production,” David Hurwitz, senior vice president at Serena, said. “In support of that, we now have a rich solutions set that spans across orchestrated IT.”
The new tools in the orchestrated IT suite are Demand Manager, Requirements Manager and Orchestrated IT Dashboard.
Demand Manager is used “to capture and prioritize all demands coming in to IT,” Hurwitz explained. Prioritization is streamlined by an orchestrated approval process, and the tool also provides an automated time capture feature that helps IT estimate how long a task will take and how much it will cost, he added.
Requirements Manager reflects the fact that “requirements have been a resurgent business for us in the last year and a half,” Hurwitz said. The software has new dashboard metrics and best-practice Key Performance Indicators to produce higher-quality requirements, he said. Further, collaboration capabilities enable all stakeholders to weigh in on requirements, quickening review and approval.
Orchestrated IT Dashboard offers predefined processes and metrics for both development and operations, Hurwitz said, and it feeds that information up to the CIO. Among the predefined metrics are cycle times, queue sizes, wait times and SLA performance.
Along with the new tools, which are available now, Serena also has updated its Service Manager and Release Manager software. Those are expected for later this spring, according to the company. The Orchestrated IT solution costs US$12,500 for 250 users.
Service Manager 3 has been updated to integrate IT service management with release management, and it offers SLA tracking for issue resolution and version comparison “to ensure fail-proof ITSM upgrades,” according to the company’s announcement of the suite. Release Manager 2.0 includes a release calendar, which Hurwitz described as “the central artifact for people to rally around,” as it is where operational and development changes are scheduled, so both sides can see what’s supposed to happen and when. This tool is what Serena calls the bridge between Dev and Ops, providing improved release environment visibility that enables the two teams to track and manage release packages.
“It takes tremendous manual effort to put a release into production. Automation provides huge ROI,” Hurwitz said. “Typically, people in ops today are too busy spinning dials. Now, they’ll be freed up to deal with the things that have gone begging.”
As to how Doug Serena and his team made all this work, well, you’ll just have to tune in. The first episode can be viewed at serena.com/DougSerenaCIO, and each five-minute episode will be aired Mondays at 12:01 AM Pacific Time through April 9.
