Serena Software Launches First Mashup Exchange

Bangalore, July 31st, 2008 — The second release of Serena Software’s on-demand Project and Portfolio Management tool is now available as Software as a Service (SaaS). Serena® Mariner® 2008 R2 gives IT and business users a way to manage their entire project portfolio quickly and easily without creating unwieldy spreadsheets in Excel. The improved interface makes common tasks more intuitive and project data more accessible and secure, helping companies (and individual departments within them) of every size – from small- and mid-size businesses to the enterprise – benefit from the SaaS advantage.

Named a Leader in Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) tools by Forrester[1], Serena Mariner provides total visibility into project status and metrics to ensure the right people are on the right projects at the right time, ultimately delivering more value to the business. Delivered as a service, Mariner further benefits companies large and small by eliminating the need to manage infrastructure or install software, while also providing faster time to value and simple subscription pricing.

“Serena’s commitment to SaaS means we are always looking for better ways to deliver software to our customers. We also look to our customers for ways to make our software better,” said René Bonvanie, senior vice-president of worldwide marketing, partners & online services. “Customers made these Mariner enhancements real, from retuning the user interface around the workflow needs of their businesses, to the specific tasks rolled up into the summary views on the datasheets.”

Like all Serena products delivered via SaaS, Mariner has published pricing and discount schedules. Mariner prices are as low as $18 per user per month, bringing the power of enterprise IT tools within reach of every business, regardless of size.

What’s New in Mariner 2008 R2

Enhancements include:

Improved user experience

· The new Mariner interface is Web 2.0-like to make it easier for users to read and quickly discover important information.

· Widget Space extends the project workspace by adding reports, data, and other content from outside of Mariner.

More accessible platform for all project-related data

· Mariner XceleratorTM: To jumpstart working with Mariner, users can now import resource and project data directly from Excel – a convenient and familiar tool. Using the Xcelerator template, users can quickly and easily add resource teams, roles, rates, and individual team members.

· Updated Microsoft Project Connector: Mariner provides native project scheduling capabilities as well as the option to integrate with Microsoft Project.

· Custom Reporting: Now users can download out-of-the-box report templates, customize them and upload new or customized report templates into Mariner.

Mariner 2008 R2 can be freely trialed here .

About Serena Software, Inc.
Serena is a privately owned company, headquartered in Redwood City, California, with 29 offices in 14 countries and almost 1000 employees. Serena provides software on premise and on demand to over 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100. Serena enables teams of programmers to become more efficient by standardizing and automating development processes across both mainframe and distributed environments. Serena enables IT business analysts and power users to improve productivity with a new generation of Web 2.0 tools to build Business Mashups. Business Mashups automate common everyday, processes, are visual and do not require coding. Serena also enables IT executives to gain visibility into their projects, resources and costs – CIO’s should have access to the same quality of information about IT as the CFO has about Finance. For more information on Serena, visit www.serena.com.

Bangalore, 29th July, 2008 - Serena Software today announced, it has further expanded its long term partnership with HCL Technologies Ltd. ("HCL"), India's leading global IT services company. As the largest outsourcing partner for Serena, providing product engineering and support for the past seven years, HCL has now implemented Serena® PVCS® Professional, Serena® Dimensions® RM and Team Track to reduce errors, track and manage change in requirements during a project’s lifecycle, thereby improving quality and reducing the time to develop and deploy solutions for HCL customers.

“We at HCL wanted a solution that would ease the work of developers, reduce delivery cycles and help projects have better control over changes to various work products created during the development and enhancement of software solutions. Serena’s products have helped us meet these objectives and achieve cost saving benefits across the organization. We have consolidated all projects/ engagement specific licenses and initiated enablement of HCL teams on various Serena products in order to reduce future cost of support and increase the productivity of teams.” said S. Sivaguru, AVP, Engineering Excellence Group, HCL Technologies.

“As a worldwide leader in developing innovative products and solutions for its customers, HCL recognized the need for, and value of, implementing industry’s best change management software,” said Munindra Kumar Bharatee, Managing Director for Serena Software in India. “Serena bridges the gap between the developer’s vision and management’s perspective to provide visibility across the organization.”

PVCS Professional is one of the most widely adopted solutions in the software configuration management (SCM) industry. PVCS is a comprehensive suite that delivers version, defect, build and issue management, and helps customers reduce development errors, establish repeatable builds and predictable development schedules, and deliver solutions to market faster.

Dimensions RM ensures that project teams effectively collect and refine project requirements by allowing enterprises to effectively manage change in requirements during the project lifecycle.

TeamTrack is a process management application that provides visibility into and repeatability across, all operational processes. Unlike other process management applications that are difficult for end users to adopt and are limited to specific IT functions, TeamTrack provides a simple web interface that controls processes across any set of operational changes.

About Serena Software, Inc.

Serena Software, Inc. provides services to make Enterprises and the business people within them more productive. More than 15,000 organizations around the world, including 96 of the Fortune 100, rely on Serena solutions delivered either on premise or on demand, to provide visibility and efficiency to the application development process. The company provides software services such as Serena Mariner (Project Portfolio Management), Serena Business Mashups, and Serena® Dimensions® (Change & Requirements Management), and will be providing Agile Lifecycle Management tools in the near future. Serena is headquartered in Redwood City, California, and has offices throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific. For more information on Serena solutions and services, visit www.serena.com.

Bangalore, July 23rd, 2008 — Serena Software announces the latest version of its enterprise-ready software solution for managing and tracking requirements through a project’s lifecycle, Serena® Dimensions® RM 10.1.4. The new version further streamlines requirements definition activities that many business analysts and project managers find tedious and cumbersome, yet are critical for application development teams.

Serena (Dimensions), named to the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner, Inc. (Magic Quadrant for Software Change and Configuration Management for Distributed Platforms, 2008 by Jim Duggan and Daniel Stang, January 23, 2008), helps corporations keep product development on track and deliver new software solutions that are timely and within the original project scope. With Dimensions RM, development teams can gather requirements at the beginning of planning, track their integration into products and manage them throughout the application development lifecycle.

“Serena has an ongoing commitment to continue to upgrade and update our product offerings, and deliver the most visionary and leading products in requirements management,” said Carl Theobald, Senior Vice President, Products for Serena.

According to Gartner's report, “Gartner estimates that market revenue growth for SCCM occurred at an average of 10% to 13% annually during the past several years. The escalation of needs to achieve faster, along with more successful deployment of changes to software, make it likely that this sector will continue to grow at a rate of 10% annually during the next five years.” (Magic Quadrant for Software Change and Configuration Management for Distributed Platforms, 2008 by Jim Duggan and Daniel Stang, January 23, 2008)

What’s New in Dimensions 10.1.4:

Requirement Templates: improved re-use of requirements
Publishing Templates: publish requirements using custom layouts
Category Management: improved handling for enterprise solutions
Attribute Descriptions: provides guidance and process support when defining requirements
Data Masking Tool: allows Serena Support to investigate issues while protecting data privacy
URL to Requirement: access requirements from everywhere by only activating a direct link
Web Services Integration to Dimensions CM: latest technology avoiding data redundancy and ready for business mashups

Dimensions RM 10.1.4 can be downloaded from its page on the Serena Support site at http://www.serena.com/pages/downloads/index.html.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted January 23, 2008 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Serena Software

Serena is a privately owned company, headquartered in Redwood City, California, with 29 offices in 14 countries and almost 1000 employees. Serena provides software on premise and on demand to over 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100. Serena enables teams of programmers to become more efficient by standardizing and automating development processes across both mainframe and distributed environments. Serena enables IT business analysts and power users to improve productivity with a new generation of Web 2.0 tools to build Business Mashups. Business Mashups automate common everyday, processes, are visual and do not require coding. Serena also enables IT executives to gain visibility into their projects, resources and costs – CIO’s should have access to the same quality of information about IT as the CFO has about Finance. For more information on Serena, visit www.serena.com.

Bangalore, July 22, 2008 – Quest Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: QSFT) today announced the addition of predictive diagnostics to its Spotlight on Oracle® product, which thousands of customers use to find and fix database performance bottlenecks in real time. The new predictive capabilities extend Spotlight’s value and allow users to predict the future performance of SQL statements.

Spotlight on Oracle analyzes SQL performance to determine which statements will have the most performance degradation given trends in execution rates and overall database load. Spotlight reports the anticipated growth in resource consumption and the percentage of the total load a particular statement will consume. By finding problematic SQL statements before performance is impacted, corrective actions can be taken without disrupting end users and organizations can more effectively meet end user Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

“In virtually every organization, the database is core to critical applications, processes and user activities. Therefore, IT must be as proactive as possible when it comes to database performance management,” said Guy Harrison, Oracle expert, Quest Software. “The traditional approach of fixing problems as they occur fails to adequately ensure business service levels.”

Spotlight on Oracle also has expanded diagnostic capabilities for Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) environments. Increasingly, organizations running RAC use services to define and control how workload is distributed across the cluster. With new RAC service diagnostics in Spotlight, DBAs can clearly see how each service is distributed across the cluster’s nodes and what resources are being consumed on each node by the various services.

Pricing and Availability
Spotlight on Oracle is available today with North American pricing beginning at $595 (USD) per CPU socket. For more information about Spotlight on Oracle, including a technical brief and white paper on predictive diagnostics, please visit www.quest.com/spotlight-on-oracle.

About Quest Software, Inc.

Quest Software, Inc., a leading enterprise systems management vendor, delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases, Windows infrastructure and virtual environments. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 90,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. Quest provides customers with client management as well as server and desktop virtualization solutions through its subsidiaries, ScriptLogic and Vizioncore. Quest Software can be found in offices around the globe and at www.quest.com.

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Quest, Quest Software and the Quest logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Quest Software in the United States and certain other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Safe multi-tenancy, is a term that few people seem to understand. I was observing a focus session recently, and when that term was used, no one in the four sessions that I observed seemed to know what it meant.
Multi-tenancy, means that multiple users can share the same resources.. A hotel provides beds for many users or tenants. Safe multi-tenancy would be a hotel where each tenant had their own room with a lock on the door, versus a youth hostel where tenants share a common room and safety is dependent on the good behavior of the tenants.
In the same way, safe multi-tenancy is required for storage users who share the same storage resources, like a SAN. Unlike DAS or Direct Attach Storage, where a user’s storage is directly attached to the user’s host server and is separated from other servers by an air gap, SAN’s create a network where any server can get to any storage that is connected to the same SAN. Safe multi-tenancy is provided by SAN zoning in the switch and LUN masking in the storage systems. This type of protection is limited and makes LUN address assignments difficult since one user may get access to LUN 0, 1, 3; and the next user would get LUN 4, 5, but not LUN 0 which is needed as a boot address.
Hitachi solved that problem by assigning each user its own virtual port address with its own address space (Host Storage Domain), so that each user could assign LUNs from LUN 0 on up, even if they shared the same physical storage port. Hitachi storage systems can assign up to 1024 virtual ports to each physical port. The address space associated with each port is separate unless it is specifically assigned to be shared by multiple virtual ports for alternate path redundancy.
Safe multi-tenancy becomes even more important when virtualization is layered on top of the SAN. While switch zoning still works, LUN masking is difficult since that is done in the storage controller and not in the SAN based virtualization appliance. Hitachi avoids this problem by implementing storage virtualization in the storage controller where Host Storage domains provide the protection for safe multi-tenancy.
While safe multi-tenancy can protect users from accessing each other’ data, it is not enough. There is still the danger that one user may dominate the use of shared resources and impact the performance of other users. For instance one user may kick off a data base reorganization which will suck up the shared cache, rippling through rows and tables, just as another user is trying to service a high performance transaction.
In order for users to get the right Quality of Service, QoS, when they need it, there must be a way to logically partition the use of common resources like cache and be able to change that partition dynamically based on policies that are triggered by time or events. Since Hitachi does storage virtualization in a storage controller, it has control of the storage cache, and other storage resources like storage spindles, in order to provide partitioning of these resources. Other storage virtualization systems that sit outside of the storage control unit are not able to provide partitioning of storage resources.
Logical partitioning goes hand in hand with safe multi-tenancy and is important when many users are sharing the same physical storage resources. This is true for a SAN, but is especially true when this sharing is done through a virtual abstraction. If you are considering storage virtualization, ask the vendor how they provide safe multi-tenancy and logical partitioning before you commit.
About the Writer:
Hu Yoshida, the CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, provides his insight into industry issues, discusses in his own words storage best practices, and provides realistic solutions to real storage needs in today. Yoshida is well known within the storage industry, and his blog was recently ranked among the “top 10 most influential” within the storage industry by Network World. In 2006, he was named “CTO of the Year” by Jon Toigo, and in October of 2006, Byte and Switch named him one of “Storage Networking’s Heaviest Hitters.”

Check out Hu’s blog at: http://blogs.hds.com/hu/

Bangalore : 14th July, 2008 - Eka Software Solutions is pleased to welcome on board Mr. Ramachandran Narayanan, who has joined as President, Americas. He will be managing our operations in North and South America covering USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

Ramachandran brings over twenty years of significant experience in Corporate Strategy, Business Unit Operations, Consultative Sales and Delivery to Eka. He has held several executive leadership positions as CIO, Business Unit Head, Vice President, and Senior Director with premier management & technology consulting organizations in US (Accenture, Sapient, Oracle, and Cognizant) and India (The Times Group of Companies).

Ramachandran has chiefly consulted with Media & Publishing, Hi-Tech, Retail, and Energy companies on Business Strategy, IT Business Management, IT Strategy & Architecture, Enterprise Applications, Infrastructure and Business Process Outsourcing.

He holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from NIT Raurkela, India. He has attended Executive General Management Program from IIM Lucknow, India and Graduate MBA courses from Wayne State University, Michigan.

About Eka Software:

Eka is a leading provider of commodity trade and risk management software. Global players in the Agriculture and Metals commodity markets have deployed our solution for managing their physical trading, position, PnL, risk, logistics and finance operations. Eka is derived from the word “EKAM”, which means ‘unified’ or ‘integrated’ in Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language. It signifies our organizational intent to provide a single-platform solution for managing trade and risk across commodities, industry verticals and business segments.

Our 100+ team comprising domain consultants, product specialists and technical experts are single mindedly focused towards delivering the maximum possible value to our customers, which we believe is not limited to the products and services we provide, but extends to the quality of our engagement and the nature of the relationship. For more details, visit www.ekaplus.com

Bangalore, July 8th, 2008 — Serena Software, the company recognized as a leader in Gartner, Inc.’s January 2008 Magic Quadrant for Software Change and Configuration Management, has launched a new Business Mashup designed specifically for the application release process. This is the first Business Mashup to solve the classic problem associated with traditional application release – it provides an automated way for application developers, IT operations, and business users to communicate and collaborate with each other during the release process. Now, with Serena® Application Release Manager (ARM), there is closed-loop coordination between all the stakeholders to ensure that more applications are released on schedule and with no surprises.

“Serena’s investments in Business Mashups – and the tremendous interest of Mashups in the enterprise – have enabled us to deliver unique innovations in the ALM market,” said Serena CEO Jeremy Burton. “The new Application Release Manager Mashup demonstrates our commitment to standardizing and automating ALM processes in the enterprise regardless of whether systems live in the mainframe or distributed world. And there’s a lot more to come. Our goal is to continue to be the leading independent provider of ALM software.”

Automated Release Management for Mainframe Software Development

Serena Application Release Manager combines Web 2.0-based workflow capabilities with ChangeMan® ZMF, the most advanced Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) application for the mainframe, to provide a powerful, efficient way to manage the application release process, from initial change requests through final deployment into the production environment.

As with any Serena Business Mashup, the Application Release Manager includes a visual process designer with out-of-the-box process templates that can be easily customized to suit individual needs. As a result, all of the project stakeholders can coordinate their activities, including application developers, IT operations teams, and even business users who traditionally had no visibility into mainframe applications.

The power to track and approve projects over a Web-enabled mobile device means participants can keep tabs on the process from any where at any time, reducing the risk of having to roll back a critical release.

More Mashups – For ALM and Other Business Workflows

Application Release Manager joins a host of other pre-built Business Mashups introduced by Serena for ALM, including:

· Issue Tracking

· Request to Test

· Agile Backlog

· Change requests

· Hardware and Software Changes

· Demand Management.

These and many other Mashups for Human Resources, Sales and Customer Support are available online at the Serena Mashup Exchange. The power of Business Mashups is shown in their ability to solve business problems ranging from simple vacation requests and sales discount approvals all the way to mission-critical application release processes.

Serena’s ALM Leadership

In addition to today’s ARM announcement, Serena has continued to make other investments to grow its ALM business. The company claims more ALM application developers and more representatives selling ALM worldwide today than ever before in its history, as well as a greater services capacity for ALM implementations. Later this year, Serena will unveil its new Agile application development solution. And, in its sixth consecutive showing, Serena was recognized as a 2008 SD Times 100 award winner in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) category.

About Serena Software, Inc.
Serena is a privately owned company, headquartered in Redwood City, California, with 29 offices in 14 countries and almost 1000 employees. Serena provides software on premise and on demand to over 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100. Serena enables teams of programmers to become more efficient by standardizing and automating development processes across both mainframe and distributed environments. Serena enables IT business analysts and power users to improve productivity with a new generation of Web 2.0 tools to build Business Mashups. Business Mashups automate common everyday, processes, are visual and do not require coding. Serena also enables IT executives to gain visibility into their projects, resources and costs – CIO’s should have access to the same quality of information about IT as the CFO has about Finance. For more information on Serena, visit www.serena.com.