Bytes Business Solutions delivers industry firsts with updated Serena enterprise change management solution

Bytes Business Solutions (BBS), a division of Bytes Technology Group Limited, a member of the Altron group, has announced the availability of several new product releases within the Serena ChangeMan family, delivering the industry`s most robust enterprise change management (ECM) solution.

BBS sales director, Christian Bowker, commented on the Serena product lines offered by BBS and said: "It is significant that one of our South African customers is the first company in the world to pilot and purchase the new general availability of the SAP integration with the Serena ChangeMan products."

These releases cover both Serena`s mainframe and distributed change management product lines. It represents several industry firsts extending the reach of their enterprise change solution to new platforms and packaged applications. The ability to manage change across the enterprise allows companies to advance quicker and more efficiently with Web initiatives that are integrated with legacy applications to ultimately reduce costs and minimise application downtime.

Gartner analyst, Jim Duggan, said: "Change management will become even more valuable in this downturn economy as companies realise the potential risks and costs resulting from not having an effective solution in place. Solutions that seamlessly extend and connect the enterprise and that manage to lower cost and application downtime are critical to survival."

BBS leading consultant, Winston Anderson, added: "The new XML Services offer customers and system integrators an enhanced programming interface that simplifies customisation and cross-product integration. By building this standardised and consistent, underlying architecture for enterprise change management and by offering a unified XML Programming interface to ChangeMan ZMF functions, the new services provide `future-proof` applications against rapid technological change. The new Serena XML Services ensure flexibility, extensibility and data format independence for the programming interface for ChangeMan ZMF."

Mark Woodward, chief executive officer and president of Serena Software Inc, said: "With this major product release we once again set the standard for enterprise change management in terms of offering the same levels of functionality, robustness and flexibility across all major computing platforms. This further confirms Serena`s leading-edge and its ongoing commitment to providing customers with innovative solutions that help drive and maximise business advantage across the enterprise."

Additional Serena enhanced features:

Serena has enhanced its distributed change management product line with new support for packaged applications, as well as support for additional platforms, integrated development environments (IDEs), application lifecycle tools and industry standards. These enhancements further extend customers` ability to utilise existing resources to manage change across multiple platforms from a single point of control, extending the change management architecture and enabling customers to better manage team collaboration, information and development processes. Among the key enhancements are:

* Integration with SAP -With the latest release of Serena ChangeMan DS, version 5.5, and Serena ChangeMan ALM, version 3.2, Serena is delivering the first certified solution to directly integrate with the SAP R/3 environment. The integration allows customers to synchronise, schedule and deploy SAP with non-SAP changes to ensure changes follow a consistent process.

* Support for additional platforms - Serena ChangeMan DS 5.5 provides new support for Linux on the IBM eServer z/Series, and is the first solution to provide support within a single environment for consolidating Unix Web servers. Also via version 5.5 and Serena ChangeMan WCM 3.3, Serena supports Hewlett-Packard NonStop (Tandem) servers, delivering the first complete enterprise solution for coordinating and managing Tandem and non-Tandem development, as well as running mission-critical, fault-tolerant applications, within a single environment.

* Support for additional lifecycle tools - Serena ChangeMan ALM 3.2 includes new support for additional lifecycle tools such as Mercury Interactive TestDirector and Microsoft Project to provide additional management visibility into the application development process.

* Support for additional IDEs - Through Serena ChangeMan DS 5.5 and Serena ChangeMan WCM 3.2, Serena provides enhanced support to an already extensive list of IDEs. These latest releases support Borland JBuilder 6.0, TogetherSoft Control Center and Visual SlickEdit editing environment. Serena ChangeMan DS 5.5 is also validated in IBM`s Ready for WebSphere Studio Software program.

Serena has also enhanced its mainframe change management product, Serena ChangeMan ZMF, with robust functionality that allows customers to employ common processes for change management, improve the integrity of the development environment, as well as broaden the reach of the change management infrastructure to interface with other business-critical applications. These functionality enhancement include:

* Enterprise Release Management -Serena ChangeMan ZMF 5.3 provides the comprehensive enterprise release management support inherent in Serena ChangeMan DS, allowing customers to employ common processes for change management across multiple platforms. This capability simplifies the process of supporting multiple release versions in motion simultaneously and/or different versions of vended applications, or different customisations, at different sites.

* XML Services - This industry first offers customers the ability to use standard XML to interact with Serena ChangeMan ZMF and allows access to mainframe data within a familiar development environment. XML Services also simplifies integration with third-party tools, as well as simplifies customisation and customisation maintenance. For example, XML Services allow customers to greatly reduce the cost of generating reports on enterprise change through integration with third-party packaged report writing applications.

* DB2 Stored Procedures - Support for DB2 has been enhanced in version 5.3 with special management of stored procedures, triggers and user defined functions to improve the integrity of the development, testing and production environments.