I had a briefing with Serena a short while ago around the new release of their ALM product Dimensions. They’re interesting to talk with because of their conservative customer base: so it’s a good way to track mainstream adoption of emerging developer practices. Things seem to be moving along nicely there. Since changing PE hands, they seem to have a renewed interest in shipping new releases, which should be fun to watch as well.
451 clients can read the full report, but here’s the 451 Take:
While our research in devops shows strong interest in the market, with developers in the technology sector ‘getting it,’ mainstream adoption of devops (or even continuous delivery) practices is still lagging. Serena has long serviced a chunk of this ‘mainstream’ pool in the form of the more conservative developers in finance, insurance, defense and other highly regulated industries. These teams require maximal governance, risk and compliance trappings; often need to integrate with a variety of not-so-new tools and processes; and are looking for very safe bets when it comes to tool suites. Thus, a company like Serena, with more than 450 customers, is responsible for bringing new innovations in application life-cycle management (ALM) to these customers, and is seeking to do just that with the Dimensions 14 release. The reception should be good, if slow, since the technologies and practices in software development have been experiencing a pleasant refresh in recent years. Serena will have to contend with several competitors – like Atlassian and TaskTop, which are similarly bringing fresh takes on ALM to the market and increasingly looking to sell into conservative accounts.
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Serena Dimensions CM starts bringing devops to its enterprise customers (451 Report)