Jeremy's Blogs has no followers yet. Be the first one to follow.
blog entry by John Nugent
Dear Team,
My first three days of this past week were spent reviewing operation presentations from the executive management team, global sales leaders, US sales management and various thought leaders. The discussions were energetic, testing everyone's understanding of the issues. Together, we challenged current thinking, debated ways to move forward, and sacrificed all sacred cows! I was excited to witness the openness, candor and professionalism with which our leaders debated the issues.
I also had the pleasure of meeting one on one with members of our management team. I continue to gain knowledge about our markets, product strategy, business model and competitors. I will soon begin the process of analyzing my findings and testing my conclusions with the executive committee. From this exercise we will determine our top five priorities.
This past weekend was spent with the Board reviewing among other things, our Q3 performance and our Q4 forecast. Today I will review my 90-day plan with the board. They are very supportive and absolutely committed to doing whatever is required to put our business back on a growth track.
Finally, we initiated a Q4 Sales SPIFF. Every sales manager has been assigned two stretch goals, with incentives, to drive performance. We also provided a quota and commission accelerator program for each sales rep. The sales team is excited about the program and is committed to overachieving this quarter. Let's all work together to make this quarter one we all can be proud of!
Very best regards,
John
http://community.serena.com/posts/6ede2709d0
blog entry by Linda Lee TaoDear Team,
I want to update you on my first week on the job. But before I do, I want to say how much I appreciate the warm welcome I've received. Your many emails of support and warm wishes meant a lot to me.
It was a pleasure to address almost 500 employees on Monday's all-hands call. Survey results, emails and conversations, revealed that the message was well received. Permit me to summarize:
* Focus our core capabilities, (what we do best) on our core business, (the products and combination of products, generating all the cash flow
* Adjacency strategy...don't stray far from our core...protect and penetrate our core customers
* Be comfortable and true to who we are
* Outward thinking vs. Inward thinking...focus on opportunities and hazards on the outside
* Where there is focus there is revenue...segment the market in alignment with our core
* The purpose of a business is to create a customer...to create a customer we must create customer value...it's about value first, features second
* Be a student of your profession
* Status quo & complacency are the two silent growth killers
* Develop a winning belief system... believe in your heart that we will grow...develop a contagious winning attitude
* Operate out of a sense of urgency...get things done now...adopt change with alacrity
* Do all we do with a high degree of integrity and treat everyone with respect & dignity
I trust that we will assimilate these messages and put them into practice. Ask yourself how your leadership, daily business activity and interactions with each other, might be transformed based on these principles.
I spent this past week listening, absorbing and learning. I had the pleasure of hosting one on one meetings with 38 managers and individual contributors across a spectrum of functions. I also hosted four town hall meetings and five round tables. On Friday, I met with our Hillsboro team. I had a great day meeting a dedicated group of people. Through these encounters, I listened to your thoughts on what is and what is not working, opportunities and challenges, along with your disappointments and hopes. I look forward to meeting many more of you over the next few weeks. I regret that I won't be able to visit our St. Albans team until the week of December 7th. A scheduled board retreat and the Thanksgiving Holiday, preclude me from visiting any earlier.
On Monday, I meet with sales management to review our Q4 forecast. This is the most critical quarter of the fiscal year. Q4 has the potential to transform a difficult year into a respectable one. It will take the combined efforts of all functional groups to get the job done. Remember, as an outward thinking organization, nothing is more important than supporting efforts to create a customer!
Very best regards,
John
http://community.serena.com/posts/2d9b14a660
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI spent last week out on the East Coast visiting customers and industry analysts.
First off I headed over to Citigroup with Greg D. and Ali. We had secured a meeting with one of the top IT guys over there (John D'Onofrio) after getting referred by Citi's Chief Innovation Officer. My basic idea for the meeting was to see if we could break out of our traditional 'change mgmt infrastructure' sandbox within Citi and get some visibility with the application development teams who exist out in the business units. This was the typical senior level meeting you dread - we were referred from above, we'd scheduled an hour... walking through the door we were told we had 30 minutes... and the guy showed up 15 minutes late. The planned agenda goes up in a puff of smoke, the slides go out the window... and the fabulous SBM / iPhone demo was a non-starter. After a frantic 10 minutes of trying to establish credibility it was pretty interesting to see John's body language change almost instantly. He told us that ALM was now up there as the #3 thing that they need to go work on - so much so that they had created a new centralized group within Citi to refine the SDLC. He went on to say that often Citi has a hard time adopting packaged software because they are so unique... so specific (blah... blah... so are my kids) ... and really what they needed was some way to take fragments of applications... something like, maybe, mashups. Anyway, we got a referral in the the SEPG group who are defining the SDLC and we'll pick up the fight there. Most interesting, this is the third time in two months I've had a (very) senior exec tell me that App Dev / ALM / SDLC is very high on their list of priorities - the beginning of a trend ?
After Citi I headed over the posh end of NYC with Rick Tyler (Jersey Boy) for a Top 150 meeting with Brown Brothers. For those of you now familair, our Top 150 program is ensuring that we get a VP level exec out to every one of our top 150 maintenance paying customers. BBH is a (very happy) ZMF customer - they like us a lot. They love the product, they love support ...but they did ask for 10% off their maintenance last year. By visiting them, worst case, we can say "Thanks"... we can also update them on improvements we've made to technical support and our ZMF product roadmap so they can see where their maintenance dollars are going (and hopefully protect that maintenance base at the time of the next renewal. Now, best case, we're looking for more business. Turns out that BBH are very interested in Agile - that's right - a MF shop who wants to understand Agile. They also have a bunch of crusty old Lotus Notes apps that they hate. Ali showed BBH the demo we'd built for Citigroup (but didn't get chance to show)... it was a financial services loan application with plenty of killer mashed in content ... but the party piece was the iPhone approval (adapted from Rajiv's early work with Peter S in support). These guys went GAGA over iPhone approval - it is the killer demo for senior guys who are impressed by chrome and gee-whiz (i include myself in that camp).
Next up we headed North to Stamford, Connecticut for a day long briefing with Gartner group. Tim Z, RJ and I had three two hour sessions lined up with the lead guy on Agile, ALM and Mashups. It was a fascinating day and I think served to re-inforce the findings of Silver Lake during their recent strategy review, and further underscore the opportunity for Serena. First on Agile - its early days. But, the market is moving rapidly and there is a real opportunity for *somebody* to solve the "Agile meets traditional" problem that every large organization will face. On ALM, Jim Duggan has got a very traditional PPM/ALM/ITCM type view of the market although I do sense that, in light of Agile, his view of the "big end-to-end tightly couple ALM thing" is shifting. I've attached his slides for your reference. In his view of the world, we're clearly a bit-part player - we playing on the edge of PPM, are big on ALM ... but have nothing (and are not likely to have anything) in the realm of large scale ITCM. That said, he openly acknowledges that up our ALM power alley he has been pleasantly suprised by what he's seen from us in Dimensions 2009R1 and AOD. If we can go on from there and do a better job of having him understand how SBM can "glue" together the ALM practitioner tools (Serena and non-Serena) and better automate the SDLC then I think we'll score big points. Finally we spoke with Anthony Bradley about SBM. Its pretty funny to see how Anthony's view of the Mashup world is slowly and surely heading towards our view of the world. He started off with Data Mashups and integration on the glass... and is now espousing the value of process mashups and the need for some underlying control(s) so that IT buys in. All in all, a day well spent.
After Gartner, we had the long drive up to Boston for a session with Forrester's two app dev analysts Dave West and Jeff Hammond. Both Jeff and Dave are ex-Rational product managers and are still carrying plenty of baggage from that era :-) I think they have a much more up to date, modern, view of Application Development than most. They are clearly in backlash mode (as is a big chunk of the market) against things like RUP and the traditional, heavyweight SCM tools of old. The good news is that most of the backlash is aimed at IBM... the bad news is that since we're a Rational competitor then we at times get tarnished with the same brush. So we've got something to prove - and DIMs 2009R1, Agile On-Demand and the mashup integration framework are all helping. Forrester would like to see us big on the LEAN message - an overarching umbrella message for the company. Whether companies are doing waterfall or agile... how can they trim fat, standardize approach and make software development more efficient.
All in all, a good week.
documentJD ALM EB for Serena.ppt (1.6MB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/1aefdbed74
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyA good read that John Scum sent on to me ... from one of the lead Agile guys at Forrester (Dave West). Enjoy.
"A very narrow definition of Agile has passed away, to be replaced by a mature, expansive version that has now joined the mainstream of development methodologies. Agile with a capital “A,” with its vision limited to the development team, died of natural causes. Its successor still worries about build scripts, daily Scrum meetings, and IDE plug-ins, but it recognizes the sovereignty of business objectives, and governs jointly with other methodologies. While we might talk more about agile with a small “a,” the significance of this change is big."
The rest of it is here.
http://community.serena.com/posts/909579b5e6
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyA good read that John Scum sent on to me ... from one of the lead Agile guys at Forrester (Dave West). Enjoy.
"A very narrow definition of Agile has passed away, to be replaced by a mature, expansive version that has now joined the mainstream of development methodologies. Agile with a capital “A,” with its vision limited to the development team, died of natural causes. Its successor still worries about build scripts, daily Scrum meetings, and IDE plug-ins, but it recognizes the sovereignty of business objectives, and governs jointly with other methodologies. While we might talk more about agile with a small “a,” the significance of this change is big."
The rest of it is here.
http://community.serena.com/posts/909579b5e6
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodySome green shoots appearing ?
"Help desk/technical support and networking are the two job areas experiencing the most growth, with 18 percent of the response each. Applications development was cited by 9 percent of CIOs"
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Conservative-Technology-Hiring-Expected-in-Fourth-Quarter-of-2009-190353/
http://community.serena.com/posts/c8183451f9
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyWe recently put on a very successful Tech Day in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Manny, Thiago, Kevin P, Tim Z, Gene K, Serenity T did a great job pulling in 80 or so attendees to our traditional mix of Application Development content. We also had in attendance Clay Richardson from Forrester talking about Lean BPM - he is one of the most influential guys in the space... here's what he had to say.
---
All –
I just want to say thank you for making me an extended member of the Serena team. I think the Lean BPM message is resonating in Latin America and I have been impressed with the overall feedback from all of your SBM customers.
As you know, I am a huge advocate of Lean BPM and have been pushing the message hard from a research perspective. I know that our combined activities are having the desired impact on the market: getting people to realize that “one size fits all” is a false option when it comes to automating business processes.
Cheers,
Clay
Clay Richardson | Senior Analyst | Forrester Research, Inc. | 8180 Greensboro Drive, Suite 700, McLean, Virginia 22102| p: 703-584-2630 | m: 703-598-9505
Research Focus: BPM suites, BPM centers of excellence, Lean BPM best practices, Agile BPM development, and roles that support process improvement
view my profile and research at: http://www.forrester.com/rb/search/results.jsp?N=0+12274
follow me at: http://twitter.com/passion4process
http://community.serena.com/posts/f136bc624e
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI think Microsoft Sharepoint is going to be both an opportunity and a competitive threat. Its everywhere... but we have a very compelling story integrating with SBM. We need more examples ("Sharepoint pack"), more positioning and be very crisp when responding to the "How are you different to Sharepoint?" question.
Check out this article in the NY Times
---
Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession
By Ashlee Vance
Hang around at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters for five or ten minutes and someone dressed in khaki pants and a blue shirt is bound to tell you about the wonders of SharePoint — one of the company’s most successful and increasingly controversial lines of software.
Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.
Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.
It can’t do everything. Executives at Microsoft will readily admit that the bits and pieces of SharePoint lack the more sophisticated features found in products from specialist software makers.
“We don’t claim we do everything,” said Chris Capossela, a senior vice president at Microsoft. “If we do 50 percent of the functions that these other companies do, but they’re the ones customers really want, that’s fine. The magic is that end users actually like to use the software.”
This strategy seems to have worked even during the recession.
While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up. Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.
Companies like Ferrari, Starbucks and Viacom have used SharePoint to create their public-facing Web sites and for various other tasks. All told, more than 17,000 customers use Sharepoint.
In many ways, SharePoint mimics the strategy Microsoft took with Office by linking together numerous applications into a single unit. This approach appeals to customers looking to save money and also represents a real threat to a variety of business software makers.
Many of these specialists like Cognos, a business intelligence software maker, and Documentum, a content management software maker, have been gobbled up by larger players looking to create their own suites. I.B.M., for example, bought Cognos, while EMC bought Documentum. Other companies like Autonomy, a maker of top-of-the-line corporate search software, remain independent.
Crucially, Microsoft has found a way to create ties between SharePoint and its more traditional products like Office and Exchange. Companies can tweak Office documents through SharePoint and receive information like whether a worker is online or not through tools in Exchange. These links have Microsoft carrying along its old-line software as it builds a more Internet-focused software line.
“SharePoint is saving Microsoft’s Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in,” said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. “It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping.”
Along these lines, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, has talked about SharePoint as the company’s next big operating system.
Microsoft has managed to undercut even the panoply of open-source companies playing in the business software market by giving away a free basic license to SharePoint if they already have Windows Server. “It’s a brilliant strategy that mimics open source in its viral, free distribution, but transcends open source in its ability to lock customers into a complete, not-free-at-all Microsoft stack - one for which they’ll pay more and more the deeper they get into SharePoint,” Mr. Asay said.
A number of smaller software companies have been eager to piggyback on SharePoint’s success. Based in San Diego, Sharepoint360 provides consulting services and software development help around the product. The company started after employees at a construction company built some Sharepoint applications and decided to market the software to other construction firms.
The start-up has helped construction companies create systems for managing projects, allowing various people to check-in on the progress of a building and keep track of documents tied to the site. It has also expanded beyond the construction area doing work for NASA, Nestle and Toshiba, according to Paul West, a co-founder of SharePoint360.
The company offers to host SharePoint applications for customers. Microsoft too wants to host more software for companies as it moves toward the cloud computing model.
Mr. West recognizes that Microsoft may begin stepping on its partners’ toes. “It may certainly come to pass that they pull the switch,” he said. “That would have implications for us.”
In the meantime, however, Microsoft subsidizes training courses and consulting work for companies like Sharepoint360.
Next year, Microsoft plans to release a new version of the software packed full of more advanced features, including stronger ties to the corporate search technology it acquired in the $1.2 billion purchase of Fast Search and Transfer, a Norwegian start-up.
Best Buy uses the Fast technology today to provide on-the-fly pricing information to customers performing product searches on its Web site.
By making these more sophisticated tools available to customers, Microsoft thinks it can keep pushing niche software makers out of the way and give business people, rather than just the tech folks, a way to work with business applications.
“We believe customers can turn off some of these point solutions,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, a general manager in Microsoft’s business software group. “With SharePoint, we can deliver a very, very approachable application to end users.”
http://community.serena.com/posts/0ef5f8f309
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI think Microsoft Sharepoint is going to be both an opportunity and a competitive threat. Its everywhere... but we have a very compelling story integrating with SBM. We need more examples ("Sharepoint pack"), more positioning and be very crisp when responding to the "How are you different to Sharepoint?" question.
Check out this article in the NY Times
---
Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession
By Ashlee Vance
Hang around at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters for five or ten minutes and someone dressed in khaki pants and a blue shirt is bound to tell you about the wonders of SharePoint — one of the company’s most successful and increasingly controversial lines of software.
Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.
Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.
It can’t do everything. Executives at Microsoft will readily admit that the bits and pieces of SharePoint lack the more sophisticated features found in products from specialist software makers.
“We don’t claim we do everything,” said Chris Capossela, a senior vice president at Microsoft. “If we do 50 percent of the functions that these other companies do, but they’re the ones customers really want, that’s fine. The magic is that end users actually like to use the software.”
This strategy seems to have worked even during the recession.
While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up. Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.
Companies like Ferrari, Starbucks and Viacom have used SharePoint to create their public-facing Web sites and for various other tasks. All told, more than 17,000 customers use Sharepoint.
In many ways, SharePoint mimics the strategy Microsoft took with Office by linking together numerous applications into a single unit. This approach appeals to customers looking to save money and also represents a real threat to a variety of business software makers.
Many of these specialists like Cognos, a business intelligence software maker, and Documentum, a content management software maker, have been gobbled up by larger players looking to create their own suites. I.B.M., for example, bought Cognos, while EMC bought Documentum. Other companies like Autonomy, a maker of top-of-the-line corporate search software, remain independent.
Crucially, Microsoft has found a way to create ties between SharePoint and its more traditional products like Office and Exchange. Companies can tweak Office documents through SharePoint and receive information like whether a worker is online or not through tools in Exchange. These links have Microsoft carrying along its old-line software as it builds a more Internet-focused software line.
“SharePoint is saving Microsoft’s Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in,” said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. “It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping.”
Along these lines, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, has talked about SharePoint as the company’s next big operating system.
Microsoft has managed to undercut even the panoply of open-source companies playing in the business software market by giving away a free basic license to SharePoint if they already have Windows Server. “It’s a brilliant strategy that mimics open source in its viral, free distribution, but transcends open source in its ability to lock customers into a complete, not-free-at-all Microsoft stack - one for which they’ll pay more and more the deeper they get into SharePoint,” Mr. Asay said.
A number of smaller software companies have been eager to piggyback on SharePoint’s success. Based in San Diego, Sharepoint360 provides consulting services and software development help around the product. The company started after employees at a construction company built some Sharepoint applications and decided to market the software to other construction firms.
The start-up has helped construction companies create systems for managing projects, allowing various people to check-in on the progress of a building and keep track of documents tied to the site. It has also expanded beyond the construction area doing work for NASA, Nestle and Toshiba, according to Paul West, a co-founder of SharePoint360.
The company offers to host SharePoint applications for customers. Microsoft too wants to host more software for companies as it moves toward the cloud computing model.
Mr. West recognizes that Microsoft may begin stepping on its partners’ toes. “It may certainly come to pass that they pull the switch,” he said. “That would have implications for us.”
In the meantime, however, Microsoft subsidizes training courses and consulting work for companies like Sharepoint360.
Next year, Microsoft plans to release a new version of the software packed full of more advanced features, including stronger ties to the corporate search technology it acquired in the $1.2 billion purchase of Fast Search and Transfer, a Norwegian start-up.
Best Buy uses the Fast technology today to provide on-the-fly pricing information to customers performing product searches on its Web site.
By making these more sophisticated tools available to customers, Microsoft thinks it can keep pushing niche software makers out of the way and give business people, rather than just the tech folks, a way to work with business applications.
“We believe customers can turn off some of these point solutions,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, a general manager in Microsoft’s business software group. “With SharePoint, we can deliver a very, very approachable application to end users.”
http://community.serena.com/posts/0ef5f8f309
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI headed out to Boston on the red-eye Tuesday to make a few sales calls with Barry O'Brien (now there's an Irish heritage if ever I saw one). First up we headed to Putnam investments. The last time I went to Putnam (several years ago) they had just merged with Marsh and seemed to had lots of nasty up tight folks in IT. This meeting was completely different. Putnam are due to go live with SBM 2009 this week-end (many thanks to Rebecca Palao and the SBM team for working through a few last minute issues!) - they are very excited about the move and love the new interface. Once 2009R1 is live there appears to be plenty more opportunities for process automation - both inside and outside IT.
Putnam are also evaluating Agile methodologies - they know they want to go there but are not 100% sure of exactly what Agile means and which project is the best candidate. Definitely an opportunity for us to establish some thought leadership. The core application development systems are largely based around CVS and Subversion and they don't really want to fight that battle right now. HP Quality center looks after testing / defect tracking and HP ServiceDesk does insident management. They main struggle is up front on requirements management and also the lack of any integration between their respective ALM systems - there may be a play for SBM here also.
Next up we headed into the boonies for a meeting in Woonsocket, RI with CVS Caremark. I've visited CVS many times before but always out of Dallas. Very recently the balance of power shifted inside CVS with a new CIO and CTO coming onboard. Up until now we've been working with them tactically on Mainframe and Distributed SCM with ZMF and Dimensions, and more strategically with ARM. The new CTO has a renewed focus on the core SDLC inside CVS - he wants best practises, standardized processes and metrics (Amen!). The downside here is that the ARM project is on hold, the upside is that we have an opportunity to present a best practises SDLC and how we're automating it today to the CIO. The goal would be to drive those best practises wider and deeper in the organization. There's also an opportunity to expand our footprint upstream to requirements mgmt. The only threat to us is IBM who are helping with the MF consolidation and clearly have some pull in the account.
Next stop was a PVCS to Dimensions migration opportunity over at Hannover Insurance. The development team is struggling big time with scalability and performance - something that we can solve with Dimensions! This is a fairly mature app dev shop - they know what they are doing - and the company is doing very well. This is one of the few places where the IT budget has increased - 50% year over year, I wish that was happening everywhere. Again, the competition is IBM ClearCase ... but Hannover are doing offshore development. I ran them through Mir's most recent data points from the Dimensions development team. The Dimensions development team sync 22,000 files (about 7Gb of data) in 37 seconds. They are in the UK and their server is in Oregon. Pretty impressive.
After a quick hop down to NYC, the following day I met up with Greg Donahue and Mike Tortorello for a visit to NYLife. We'd met the CIO of NYLife at a CIO Summit in NYC a couple of months back - she'd shown interest in knowing more about our offerings. This is a classic case where we've had PVCS, Dimensions & SBM deployed in small pockets way down the organization and really struggled to get any kind of major forward movement. To our delight, the CIO invited her entire staff to the meeting! Interestingly enough, the thing that caught their attention was Mike T's "Developer Productivity Index" line item on the agenda. This spurred a pretty major debate back and forth between the head of App Dev and the head of Data Center operations. They were somewhat disappointed when we didn't blurt out an algorithm for the answer ("42") but understood that we were poking at whether or not they had good metrics around the development process. Even more interesting, right after the productivity index debate, was the fact that the CIO had been discussing Agile development with NYLife's chairman before the meeting - which is why she was 40 minutes late! To cut a long story short, we achieved our objective - securing sponsorship from the head of App Dev for us to conduct an ALM workshop to understand how they build software. This call was a classic case of getting to the right people and saving about 1000 lower level meetings to understand just how strategic improving the SDLC is.
Next up, we cut out of midtown across the Lincoln Tunnel over towards New Jersey for a meeting LexisNexis. Rick Tyler had tee'd up a meeting with the VP of Application Development there who was relatively new in the job - 2 months. LexisNexis is pretty much an agile shop that is moving aggressively to .NET. We have a big PVCS footprint but as the operation has scaled its grinding to a halt. This is a classic PVCS to Dimensions play for us. Turns out, there may be an upstream requirements mgmt opportunity but there is an incumbent agile player ("Bluexxxx" can't remember exactly - Rick?). Hot buttons for this VP of app dev were
- Ensuring that all their silo'd dev teams can collaborate effectively... accessing shared source and services.
- Making sure that developer productivity and their tight engagement with the business is not hindered by rigid development process.
- Improving the release process
- Ensuring that the development artifacts are protected by a rock solid infrastructure (they thought they'd lost about 500,00 files the other day!)
We (again) secured sponsorship to perform an ALM assessment and really understand all the in's and out's of their development process. We can then of course go back and highlight where the gaps are... and where we can help.
http://community.serena.com/posts/7a3cd2d67d
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI headed out to Boston on the red-eye Tuesday to make a few sales calls with Barry O'Brien (now there's an Irish heritage if ever I saw one). First up we headed to Putnam investments. The last time I went to Putnam (several years ago) they had just merged with Marsh and seemed to had lots of nasty up tight folks in IT. This meeting was completely different. Putnam are due to go live with SBM 2009 this week-end (many thanks to Rebecca Palao and the SBM team for working through a few last minute issues!) - they are very excited about the move and love the new interface. Once 2009R1 is live there appears to be plenty more opportunities for process automation - both inside and outside IT.
Putnam are also evaluating Agile methodologies - they know they want to go there but are not 100% sure of exactly what Agile means and which project is the best candidate. Definitely an opportunity for us to establish some thought leadership. The core application development systems are largely based around CVS and Subversion and they don't really want to fight that battle right now. HP Quality center looks after testing / defect tracking and HP ServiceDesk does insident management. They main struggle is up front on requirements management and also the lack of any integration between their respective ALM systems - there may be a play for SBM here also.
Next up we headed into the boonies for a meeting in Woonsocket, RI with CVS Caremark. I've visited CVS many times before but always out of Dallas. Very recently the balance of power shifted inside CVS with a new CIO and CTO coming onboard. Up until now we've been working with them tactically on Mainframe and Distributed SCM with ZMF and Dimensions, and more strategically with ARM. The new CTO has a renewed focus on the core SDLC inside CVS - he wants best practises, standardized processes and metrics (Amen!). The downside here is that the ARM project is on hold, the upside is that we have an opportunity to present a best practises SDLC and how we're automating it today to the CIO. The goal would be to drive those best practises wider and deeper in the organization. There's also an opportunity to expand our footprint upstream to requirements mgmt. The only threat to us is IBM who are helping with the MF consolidation and clearly have some pull in the account.
Next stop was a PVCS to Dimensions migration opportunity over at Hannover Insurance. The development team is struggling big time with scalability and performance - something that we can solve with Dimensions! This is a fairly mature app dev shop - they know what they are doing - and the company is doing very well. This is one of the few places where the IT budget has increased - 50% year over year, I wish that was happening everywhere. Again, the competition is IBM ClearCase ... but Hannover are doing offshore development. I ran them through Mir's most recent data points from the Dimensions development team. The Dimensions development team sync 22,000 files (about 7Gb of data) in 37 seconds. They are in the UK and their server is in Oregon. Pretty impressive.
After a quick hop down to NYC, the following day I met up with Greg Donahue and Mike Tortorello for a visit to NYLife. We'd met the CIO of NYLife at a CIO Summit in NYC a couple of months back - she'd shown interest in knowing more about our offerings. This is a classic case where we've had PVCS, Dimensions & SBM deployed in small pockets way down the organization and really struggled to get any kind of major forward movement. To our delight, the CIO invited her entire staff to the meeting! Interestingly enough, the thing that caught their attention was Mike T's "Developer Productivity Index" line item on the agenda. This spurred a pretty major debate back and forth between the head of App Dev and the head of Data Center operations. They were somewhat disappointed when we didn't blurt out an algorithm for the answer ("42") but understood that we were poking at whether or not they had good metrics around the development process. Even more interesting, right after the productivity index debate, was the fact that the CIO had been discussing Agile development with NYLife's chairman before the meeting - which is why she was 40 minutes late! To cut a long story short, we achieved our objective - securing sponsorship from the head of App Dev for us to conduct an ALM workshop to understand how they build software. This call was a classic case of getting to the right people and saving about 1000 lower level meetings to understand just how strategic improving the SDLC is.
Next up, we cut out of midtown across the Lincoln Tunnel over towards New Jersey for a meeting LexisNexis. Rick Tyler had tee'd up a meeting with the VP of Application Development there who was relatively new in the job - 2 months. LexisNexis is pretty much an agile shop that is moving aggressively to .NET. We have a big PVCS footprint but as the operation has scaled its grinding to a halt. This is a classic PVCS to Dimensions play for us. Turns out, there may be an upstream requirements mgmt opportunity but there is an incumbent agile player ("Bluexxxx" can't remember exactly - Rick?). Hot buttons for this VP of app dev were
- Ensuring that all their silo'd dev teams can collaborate effectively... accessing shared source and services.
- Making sure that developer productivity and their tight engagement with the business is not hindered by rigid development process.
- Improving the release process
- Ensuring that the development artifacts are protected by a rock solid infrastructure (they thought they'd lost about 500,00 files the other day!)
We (again) secured sponsorship to perform an ALM assessment and really understand all the in's and out's of their development process. We can then of course go back and highlight where the gaps are... and where we can help.
http://community.serena.com/posts/7a3cd2d67d
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI headed out to Boston on the red-eye Tuesday to make a few sales calls with Barry O'Brien (now there's an Irish heritage if ever I saw one). First up we headed to Putnam investments. The last time I went to Putnam (several years ago) they had just merged with Marsh and seemed to had lots of nasty up tight folks in IT. This meeting was completely different. Putnam are due to go live with SBM 2009 this week-end (many thanks to Rebecca Palao and the SBM team for working through a few last minute issues!) - they are very excited about the move and love the new interface. Once 2009R1 is live there appears to be plenty more opportunities for process automation - both inside and outside IT.
Putnam are also evaluating Agile methodologies - they know they want to go there but are not 100% sure of exactly what Agile means and which project is the best candidate. Definitely an opportunity for us to establish some thought leadership. The core application development systems are largely based around CVS and Subversion and they don't really want to fight that battle right now. HP Quality center looks after testing / defect tracking and HP ServiceDesk does insident management. They main struggle is up front on requirements management and also the lack of any integration between their respective ALM systems - there may be a play for SBM here also.
Next up we headed into the boonies for a meeting in Woonsocket, RI with CVS Caremark. I've visited CVS many times before but always out of Dallas. Very recently the balance of power shifted inside CVS with a new CIO and CTO coming onboard. Up until now we've been working with them tactically on Mainframe and Distributed SCM with ZMF and Dimensions, and more strategically with ARM. The new CTO has a renewed focus on the core SDLC inside CVS - he wants best practises, standardized processes and metrics (Amen!). The downside here is that the ARM project is on hold, the upside is that we have an opportunity to present a best practises SDLC and how we're automating it today to the CIO. The goal would be to drive those best practises wider and deeper in the organization. There's also an opportunity to expand our footprint upstream to requirements mgmt. The only threat to us is IBM who are helping with the MF consolidation and clearly have some pull in the account.
Next stop was a PVCS to Dimensions migration opportunity over at Hannover Insurance. The development team is struggling big time with scalability and performance - something that we can solve with Dimensions! This is a fairly mature app dev shop - they know what they are doing - and the company is doing very well. This is one of the few places where the IT budget has increased - 50% year over year, I wish that was happening everywhere. Again, the competition is IBM ClearCase ... but Hannover are doing offshore development. I ran them through Mir's most recent data points from the Dimensions development team. The Dimensions development team sync 22,000 files (about 7Gb of data) in 37 seconds. They are in the UK and their server is in Oregon. Pretty impressive.
After a quick hop down to NYC, the following day I met up with Greg Donahue and Mike Tortorello for a visit to NYLife. We'd met the CIO of NYLife at a CIO Summit in NYC a couple of months back - she'd shown interest in knowing more about our offerings. This is a classic case where we've had PVCS, Dimensions & SBM deployed in small pockets way down the organization and really struggled to get any kind of major forward movement. To our delight, the CIO invited her entire staff to the meeting! Interestingly enough, the thing that caught their attention was Mike T's "Developer Productivity Index" line item on the agenda. This spurred a pretty major debate back and forth between the head of App Dev and the head of Data Center operations. They were somewhat disappointed when we didn't blurt out an algorithm for the answer ("42") but understood that we were poking at whether or not they had good metrics around the development process. Even more interesting, right after the productivity index debate, was the fact that the CIO had been discussing Agile development with NYLife's chairman before the meeting - which is why she was 40 minutes late! To cut a long story short, we achieved our objective - securing sponsorship from the head of App Dev for us to conduct an ALM workshop to understand how they build software. This call was a classic case of getting to the right people and saving about 1000 lower level meetings to understand just how strategic improving the SDLC is.
Next up, we cut out of midtown across the Lincoln Tunnel over towards New Jersey for a meeting LexisNexis. Rick Tyler had tee'd up a meeting with the VP of Application Development there who was relatively new in the job - 2 months. LexisNexis is pretty much an agile shop that is moving aggressively to .NET. We have a big PVCS footprint but as the operation has scaled its grinding to a halt. This is a classic PVCS to Dimensions play for us. Turns out, there may be an upstream requirements mgmt opportunity but there is an incumbent agile player ("Bluexxxx" can't remember exactly - Rick?). Hot buttons for this VP of app dev were
- Ensuring that all their silo'd dev teams can collaborate effectively... accessing shared source and services.
- Making sure that developer productivity and their tight engagement with the business is not hindered by rigid development process.
- Improving the release process
- Ensuring that the development artifacts are protected by a rock solid infrastructure (they thought they'd lost about 500,00 files the other day!)
We (again) secured sponsorship to perform an ALM assessment and really understand all the in's and out's of their development process. We can then of course go back and highlight where the gaps are... and where we can help.
http://community.serena.com/posts/7a3cd2d67d
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyLast Sunday I headed out to London for a couple of meetings in the city with Deutsche Bank and Barclays. In time honored fashion, when I arrived in London it was raining - funnily enough, just like it was when I arrived this time last year, see here. The natives were protested greatly at my disparaging remarks about the weather "but its been scorching hot for weeks... did you see Wimbledon" etc.
Anyway, first up was a meeting over at Deutsche Bank - after successfully getting into production with our German Tax Witholding mashup we were very keen to find a new project within the account. Our regular sponsor, Jonathon Smart, was out of town but Ian had managed to get to a peers of Jonathons who had broader responsibility withing the bank. We had a very positive meeting and it seemed there is a very good opportunity to provide a "lean" tool for process automation within the bank. Several times during the meeting it was acknowledged that the bank's standard for BPM, Tibco, really wasn't suitable for a lot of the human workflow's we were discussing. Another reminder that positioning SBM as complimentary to incumbent BPM tools vs. as a competitor is the way to go.
After that we headed over to Barclays who have a pretty interesting process problem on the App Dev side of IT that we've positioned SBM to solve. The project is struggling right now for funding in light of the current economic environment, but we are planning an initial phase rollout which could go global later. Barclays have several ALM tools already, mainly from IBM - Requisite Pro, ClearCase and ClearQuest. They also have HP Quality Center. What they're missing though is a coherent view into the development process - where are projects at, what are the key metrics and how are resources being utilized ? SBM is being used as the "process glue" between the various practitioner tools. Once that process is in place then metrics can be extracted to determine the state of each project. This is a very similar discussion to the one I had with JPMC's CIO a few weeks ago in NYC. I'd like to see if we can formulate this discussion into a pre-built mashup - it seems to be a hot button right now.
Later that evening I headed back to Heathrow and got on a plane to South Africa for a meeting with Nedbank. This territory is covered by our distrbution partners and managed by Marek Szeliga. Not a lot of people know this but Marek was close to being a pro football (soccer) player in his younger days. It makes it even more impressive then that Erika Marwood ran rings around him in the Club Beack Soccer game - see here - Marek is the one in the yellow shorts. Our partner in the region is Blue Turtle and I have to say they are a very impressive bunch - knowledgable, technical and with solid relationships. Nedbank have struggled for many years with SCM - battling on with IBM solutions until recently when we got the opportunity to propose a replacement. This is a very important first project for us at the bank and, most importantly a Q2 deal!
After not enough time in South Africa I headed back to England, just in time for our Serena Gives Back charity day. This was a fantastic event - all credit to Alison, Fiona, Nigel and the entire SGB committee for everything they organized. We kicked off the day with a 28 mile bike ride (except for Mir, who led the 8 mile version... which, to his credit, he did twice. Donal showed up late with some excuse about not having a helmet ... truth be told, he waited until the serious bikers had left, then went and bought a helment to go on the easy ride with Mir) in the farm roads around St Albans. Blue skies, fresh air, country villages ... it really was England at its best. After spending the best part of two days on a plane it was just what I needed to clean out the pipes - mind you, I did misread the last sign and ended up on the road to Hemel Hempstead. That 28 miles turned into 32 pretty quickly.
After the bike ride we headed over to the local park for a "rounders" competition. "Rounders" is like baseball... but with a short bat, that you hold in one hand - as ably demonstrated by me here. All the rest is pretty much the same. Due to some dodgy umpire work (Ian), Claire Ashenhursts team won but a good time was had by all. Finally, back in the St Albans office we invited several WWII veterans over for afternoon tea (how British) to generally socialize and recount their memories. Some of the memories were more vivid than others, including one chap (Fred) who seemed to remember every action in initimate detail from the landing in June 1944 right up to the taking of Berlin ... after 40 minutes we had to shut him up!
Of course the real winner last Friday was charity - we raised about 750 pounds in the various activities during the day. I also think the Serena team came out as a big winner - I've said for some time that teams are built off the field of play, not on it. This was as much a great team event as it was a great Serena Gives Back event. Long may it continue!
http://community.serena.com/posts/36330838de
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyLast Sunday I headed out to London for a couple of meetings in the city with Deutsche Bank and Barclays. In time honored fashion, when I arrived in London it was raining - funnily enough, just like it was when I arrived this time last year, see here. The natives were protested greatly at my disparaging remarks about the weather "but its been scorching hot for weeks... did you see Wimbledon" etc.
Anyway, first up was a meeting over at Deutsche Bank - after successfully getting into production with our German Tax Witholding mashup we were very keen to find a new project within the account. Our regular sponsor, Jonathon Smart, was out of town but Ian had managed to get to a peers of Jonathons who had broader responsibility withing the bank. We had a very positive meeting and it seemed there is a very good opportunity to provide a "lean" tool for process automation within the bank. Several times during the meeting it was acknowledged that the bank's standard for BPM, Tibco, really wasn't suitable for a lot of the human workflow's we were discussing. Another reminder that positioning SBM as complimentary to incumbent BPM tools vs. as a competitor is the way to go.
After that we headed over to Barclays who have a pretty interesting process problem on the App Dev side of IT that we've positioned SBM to solve. The project is struggling right now for funding in light of the current economic environment, but we are planning an initial phase rollout which could go global later. Barclays have several ALM tools already, mainly from IBM - Requisite Pro, ClearCase and ClearQuest. They also have HP Quality Center. What they're missing though is a coherent view into the development process - where are projects at, what are the key metrics and how are resources being utilized ? SBM is being used as the "process glue" between the various practitioner tools. Once that process is in place then metrics can be extracted to determine the state of each project. This is a very similar discussion to the one I had with JPMC's CIO a few weeks ago in NYC. I'd like to see if we can formulate this discussion into a pre-built mashup - it seems to be a hot button right now.
Later that evening I headed back to Heathrow and got on a plane to South Africa for a meeting with Nedbank. This territory is covered by our distrbution partners and managed by Marek Szeliga. Not a lot of people know this but Marek was close to being a pro football (soccer) player in his younger days. It makes it even more impressive then that Erika Marwood ran rings around him in the Club Beack Soccer game - see here - Marek is the one in the yellow shorts. Our partner in the region is Blue Turtle and I have to say they are a very impressive bunch - knowledgable, technical and with solid relationships. Nedbank have struggled for many years with SCM - battling on with IBM solutions until recently when we got the opportunity to propose a replacement. This is a very important first project for us at the bank and, most importantly a Q2 deal!
After not enough time in South Africa I headed back to England, just in time for our Serena Gives Back charity day. This was a fantastic event - all credit to Alison, Fiona, Nigel and the entire SGB committee for everything they organized. We kicked off the day with a 28 mile bike ride (except for Mir, who led the 8 mile version... which, to his credit, he did twice. Donal showed up late with some excuse about not having a helmet ... truth be told, he waited until the serious bikers had left, then went and bought a helment to go on the easy ride with Mir) in the farm roads around St Albans. Blue skies, fresh air, country villages ... it really was England at its best. After spending the best part of two days on a plane it was just what I needed to clean out the pipes - mind you, I did misread the last sign and ended up on the road to Hemel Hempstead. That 28 miles turned into 32 pretty quickly.
After the bike ride we headed over to the local park for a "rounders" competition. "Rounders" is like baseball... but with a short bat, that you hold in one hand - as ably demonstrated by me here. All the rest is pretty much the same. Due to some dodgy umpire work (Ian), Claire Ashenhursts team won but a good time was had by all. Finally, back in the St Albans office we invited several WWII veterans over for afternoon tea (how British) to generally socialize and recount their memories. Some of the memories were more vivid than others, including one chap (Fred) who seemed to remember every action in initimate detail from the landing in June 1944 right up to the taking of Berlin ... after 40 minutes we had to shut him up!
Of course the real winner last Friday was charity - we raised about 750 pounds in the various activities during the day. I also think the Serena team came out as a big winner - I've said for some time that teams are built off the field of play, not on it. This was as much a great team event as it was a great Serena Gives Back event. Long may it continue!
http://community.serena.com/posts/36330838de
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyA bit of trivia to start with, after all it's July 4th. Who remembers Turning Japanese - sang by a one hit wonder band in the early 80's ? Who was the band ? If you have no idea what I'm talking about you can find out here.
As you might have guessed, I spent last week in Tokyo catching up with our new country manager , Osaka-san. Osaka-san joined Serena in February - he came from Telelogic, which errr... became a different company once it was assimilated by IBM last year. We've had a reasonable business around PVCS for many years in Japan, but we've really struggled to break out from that and transform ourselves into a serious enterprise software player (our success at Aflac not withstanding!).
Japan is a difficult place to be successful - and not just because all your products have to be double byte enabled. Japan has an incredibly high expectation for quality - not just product quality, but quality of support. The routes to market in Japan are owned by the big OEM's - NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu etc. It requires a delicate balance of partnering and selling direct in order to be successful. And, key to all of this is trust and relationships.
I arrived in Tokyo on Monday afternoon - thankfully before the rush hour begins into the city. Nevertheless, its a good 90 minute drive in. On Tuesday we had a mix of internal meetings and press briefings. The Japanese team had lined up a number of interviews to talk about our new strategy in Japan, ALM and Lean BPM. There was a tremendous amount of interest in Lean BPM, Mashups and Web 2.0 in general - its seems all that stuff is top of mind right now. If your Japanese is up to it, check out some of the coverage here.
On Wednesday we headed out for a meeting with NEC. Osaka-san has many good relationships with the big integrators in Japan - we were meeting with NEC Software's #2 guy. He proved to be quite a character, announcing that we need to delay the start of the meeting for 5 minutes because he drank too much the previous night and had a hangover! Once he'd taken some of his magic anti-hangover juice he proceeded to tell us about some of NEC's challenges - their biggest being the fact that they are using CVS to manage source code and they have a nightmare sharing code with their various development partners. We have a technical follow-up meeting next week to dive into more detail, but this kind of a problem is right in our wheel house. After NEC we headed over to Hitachi, again we were in at the top meeting with the guy who runs Hitachi Software. We have a Q2 opportunity here on the Hibun project - Hibun is Japanese for secure document. Hitachi have a document collaboration system which has about 4000 customers and 2 million users - they have big internal problems managing the supply chain from customer incident through QA to R&D which they believe SBM can solve. We also believe there is an opportunity to open up their support channels to their customers using SBM at a later point in time. Finally, there also may be an OEM opportunity with Hitachi - I'd love to get all those 4000 companies (and 2M users!) using SBM to develop process flows on top of Hibun!
All in all, I'm delighted with just how far our business in Japan has come in the last 4-5 months. We have very real SBM and ZMF opportunities in the pipeline and have started to develop those all important relationships with the big OEM manufacturers. Our team has been re-invigorated by the arrival of Osaka-san and I'm expecting great things in the back half of the year! For now, we simply need to convert our pipeline to revenue...
http://community.serena.com/posts/0858ff1b6e
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyLast week I spend some time down in Sao Paolo with Manny Marinez and Thiago Santos to see all of exciting things going on in Brazil. Sao Paolo never ceases to amaze me - it is absolutely massive! There are about 11m people living in the city and because the city 'evoved' over time the traffic is crazy - i thought it was bad in London, but its worse in Sao Paolo. For all its size though, Sao Paolo is not exactly the tourist mecca you would think. In fact on my first visit there about ten years ago I asked concierge where I could go to see the city and he replied "Sir, there is nothing to see in Sao Paolo".
So, sightseeing mecca it may not be ... but there is plenty of business going on in Brazil. Like most other places, Brazil has been feeling the pinch of the current economic climate. But not as bad as many others. Brazil has been in a mild recession through the first quarter but it is expected to pull out of recession towards the year end. Read more here. The financial institutions in Brazil have also been a lot more conservative than in the US and Western Europe. They have been far less exposed to the financial meltdown and so now find themselves in a position to expand and take share.
I called on two big customers - Bradesco and Itau to discuss ZMF opportunities. Both banks are looking to potentially expanding their current footprint - Bradesco is an upgrade of an existing environment, Itau is a potential consolidation of homegrown and CA Endeavor run systems. Both are big $1M+ opportunities that should come to fruition in the next couple of quarters.
While in town Thiago also managed to line up the Brazil equivalent of the FT (so he tells me anyway). They ran a nice story which I've attached. Its amazing what a bit of exposure can do to further our cause in this part of the world. I left full of confidence about what the LATAM can achieve this year - I'm looking for a strong performance from them in H2!
After spending time with our new partner in the region - B2BR - I managed to catch part of the Brazil vs S Africa game in the Confederations Cup. After seeing the US beat Spain i figured anything could happen. And it almost di - much to the disgust of the local crowd assembled around the TV in the bar. Brazil saved themselves with a typically brilliant piece of Brazil magic five minutes from time.
documentvalor 1.jpg (1MB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/8712f904e8
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI was out on the east coast all this week - first in NYC where Rick Tyler and I met with the CIO of JPMC - Guy Chiarello. This was a follow up from an after dinner speech that Guy had given a few weeks back and commented on his desire for a "developer productivity index". We had a very interesting discussion ranging from dumping CA on the mainframe (as an aside : did you know that JPMC processes 55000 changes packages each month with ZMF vs 5000 for Endeavor ? Better still, our packages take an average of 14 mins to push to production vs up to 3 hours for CA depending on the number of components in the package!) to measuring developer productivity to replacing Lotus Notes. I think there is a huge opportunity in the latter activity -not just at JPMC, but around the world. Guy commented that at his last Wall St CIO meeting Lotus Notes replacement was the #1 topic. Net of the meeting was that Guy introduced us to his two key VP's who are making the decision around developer tools and Lotus Notes replacement. He also offered an audience to present the results of our MF investigation vs. CA.
After NYC I headed to Washington DC for a meeting with the US CIO - Vivek Kundra. I guess this is the ultimate in "getting to the right person" - the most senior tech guy in the country! I'd love to claim all the credit for this but actually Caren Bonamassa deserves it. She attended a dinner where Vivek was speaking. He mentioned during the speech a desire for Goverment to do more in house (and not feed the big SI's) and so he would meet with vendors directly. He directed inquiries to a guy sat on the table across from Caren and so she dived in after the speech.
Our appointment was at 9.40am in the GSA building downtown Washington DC. Of course there were many rules - no bags, no heavy overcoats, one sheet of paper, only 20 slides, no animations, no federal logo's etc etc etc. And then we had to get in the building... almost a heroic act in and of itself - a full 20 minutes. Once inside we were escorted by a particularly nice african american lady (I forget her name) to a waiting room. Carl, Caren and I were finalizing our plan of attack when the (particularly nice) african american lady advised us to "cut to the chase" and "be energetic" and "if I do this then shut up" and "if I do this then hurry it up". I took an executive decision to dump our (beautifully prepared) powerpoints and go commando. With Carl and Caren backing me up what could go wrong ?
We walked into the room which was like any somewhat rundown government conference room - vivek was sitting down there rocking back on his chair doing email on his blackberry (like most of you do in meetings). I forgot - he's only 35. It was especially weird for me because I rarely go into meetings with folks at this level that are younger than me - probably Carl and Caren too! We were greeted with the fairly non-traditional "how's it going ?" which i think put everyone at ease immediately - Vivek seemed at first blush like a very cool guy.
We talked a little bit about our moves internally to cloud computing infrastructure - a hot button for Vivek. When he ran IT at the District of Columbia he put in Google Apps and so understands the economics of the cloud model. Very quickly he got to "hey, so what can you guys do for the Federal Government ?". I started off by basically saying that the government had process out the wazoo and much of it was largely taking place between people, email, memo's and voice mail. And, as a result, there was very little transparency or visibility into what was going on. The #1 edict of the Obama administration to government agencies has been around transparency, visibility and (therefore) accountability. I went on to suggest that by taking a lot of these processes online - quickly - they could improve efficiency and get the added benefit of transparency and visibiltiy. Oh, and by the way, we have the fastest, cheapest way to do this with our Lean BPM offering.
There were quite a number of questions about Sharepoint and how we were different - Sharepoint is an immovable object in the Federal Government and its just a given that its the standard for document collaboration. There were also questions about openness and connectivity to legacy systems - the mashup pitch went down a treat. Finally, we had questions about "who's using it ?". Unknown to many, we have over 200 implementations of SBM in the Federal Government with over 10,000 users. We highlighted the Office of Personnel Management who have written approximately 80 process flows over the last 4 years - 2 per month. This is being done by 3 in house "mashers" and 70% of OPM staff interact with those process flows daily. They have a goal of getting that to 100% over the next couple of years.
By accident or design, Vivek commented that he was visiting OPM next week and would really like to see what they were doing - that's huge for us, as they are a great reference! Finally, we pitched Vivek on establishing a Government Process Service Provider on one of their five shared service centers. Why couldn't he host the top 1000 Federal Process Flows on there ? Everything from Recovery Act Project Requests to Employee Onboarding to Travel Approval. This resonated big time - he is sick and tired of every agency doing absolutely everything differently.
Sadly our time was up - but it couldn't have gone better. Our (particularly nice) african american lady commented afterwards that "we did awesome" and gave us one piece of advice "do what they said" ... meaning, make sure we follow up and make the OPM demo happen. They were really interested in what we had to say.
A great meeting and a great trip - thanks to Caren for setting everything up and getting me and Carl up to speed on the Federal space. Also to Carl for winging his way out to DC just for the meeting (and sitting in the middle seat in coach on the way back!)
http://community.serena.com/posts/aa77d661f0
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI was out on the east coast all this week - first in NYC where Rick Tyler and I met with the CIO of JPMC - Guy Chiarello. This was a follow up from an after dinner speech that Guy had given a few weeks back and commented on his desire for a "developer productivity index". We had a very interesting discussion ranging from dumping CA on the mainframe (as an aside : did you know that JPMC processes 55000 changes packages each month with ZMF vs 5000 for Endeavor ? Better still, our packages take an average of 14 mins to push to production vs up to 3 hours for CA depending on the number of components in the package!) to measuring developer productivity to replacing Lotus Notes. I think there is a huge opportunity in the latter activity -not just at JPMC, but around the world. Guy commented that at his last Wall St CIO meeting Lotus Notes replacement was the #1 topic. Net of the meeting was that Guy introduced us to his two key VP's who are making the decision around developer tools and Lotus Notes replacement. He also offered an audience to present the results of our MF investigation vs. CA.
After NYC I headed to Washington DC for a meeting with the US CIO - Vivek Kundra. I guess this is the ultimate in "getting to the right person" - the most senior tech guy in the country! I'd love to claim all the credit for this but actually Caren Bonamassa deserves it. She attended a dinner where Vivek was speaking. He mentioned during the speech a desire for Goverment to do more in house (and not feed the big SI's) and so he would meet with vendors directly. He directed inquiries to a guy sat on the table across from Caren and so she dived in after the speech.
Our appointment was at 9.40am in the GSA building downtown Washington DC. Of course there were many rules - no bags, no heavy overcoats, one sheet of paper, only 20 slides, no animations, no federal logo's etc etc etc. And then we had to get in the building... almost a heroic act in and of itself - a full 20 minutes. Once inside we were escorted by a particularly nice african american lady (I forget her name) to a waiting room. Carl, Caren and I were finalizing our plan of attack when the (particularly nice) african american lady advised us to "cut to the chase" and "be energetic" and "if I do this then shut up" and "if I do this then hurry it up". I took an executive decision to dump our (beautifully prepared) powerpoints and go commando. With Carl and Caren backing me up what could go wrong ?
We walked into the room which was like any somewhat rundown government conference room - vivek was sitting down there rocking back on his chair doing email on his blackberry (like most of you do in meetings). I forgot - he's only 35. It was especially weird for me because I rarely go into meetings with folks at this level that are younger than me - probably Carl and Caren too! We were greeted with the fairly non-traditional "how's it going ?" which i think put everyone at ease immediately - Vivek seemed at first blush like a very cool guy.
We talked a little bit about our moves internally to cloud computing infrastructure - a hot button for Vivek. When he ran IT at the District of Columbia he put in Google Apps and so understands the economics of the cloud model. Very quickly he got to "hey, so what can you guys do for the Federal Government ?". I started off by basically saying that the government had process out the wazoo and much of it was largely taking place between people, email, memo's and voice mail. And, as a result, there was very little transparency or visibility into what was going on. The #1 edict of the Obama administration to government agencies has been around transparency, visibility and (therefore) accountability. I went on to suggest that by taking a lot of these processes online - quickly - they could improve efficiency and get the added benefit of transparency and visibiltiy. Oh, and by the way, we have the fastest, cheapest way to do this with our Lean BPM offering.
There were quite a number of questions about Sharepoint and how we were different - Sharepoint is an immovable object in the Federal Government and its just a given that its the standard for document collaboration. There were also questions about openness and connectivity to legacy systems - the mashup pitch went down a treat. Finally, we had questions about "who's using it ?". Unknown to many, we have over 200 implementations of SBM in the Federal Government with over 10,000 users. We highlighted the Office of Personnel Management who have written approximately 80 process flows over the last 4 years - 2 per month. This is being done by 3 in house "mashers" and 70% of OPM staff interact with those process flows daily. They have a goal of getting that to 100% over the next couple of years.
By accident or design, Vivek commented that he was visiting OPM next week and would really like to see what they were doing - that's huge for us, as they are a great reference! Finally, we pitched Vivek on establishing a Government Process Service Provider on one of their five shared service centers. Why couldn't he host the top 1000 Federal Process Flows on there ? Everything from Recovery Act Project Requests to Employee Onboarding to Travel Approval. This resonated big time - he is sick and tired of every agency doing absolutely everything differently.
Sadly our time was up - but it couldn't have gone better. Our (particularly nice) african american lady commented afterwards that "we did awesome" and gave us one piece of advice "do what they said" ... meaning, make sure we follow up and make the OPM demo happen. They were really interested in what we had to say.
A great meeting and a great trip - thanks to Caren for setting everything up and getting me and Carl up to speed on the Federal space. Also to Carl for winging his way out to DC just for the meeting (and sitting in the middle seat in coach on the way back!)
http://community.serena.com/posts/aa77d661f0
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyGoogle takes further steps into enterprise functionality with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, designed to integrate Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps Premier and Education editions. Google's other enterprise-friendly steps throughout 2009 have included Gmail offline functionality and full BlackBerry interoperability. Read all about it here.
http://community.serena.com/posts/342bf62a75
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyEvery now and then you come across something that is so much of a blatant rip off your jaw drops. I received the presentation (attached to this post) last week - its about BPM and Mashups... from IBM. Basically IBM has taken everything - including our demo's - from our Lean BPM positioning. Far from being scared by this I'm actually delighted. They can get a level of scale on our message that we never could. Also, if you want some validation of our direction I think this says it all.
documentIBM - BPM and Mashups As-a-Service.pdf (4.7MB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/8848f31620
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyEvery now and then you come across something that is so much of a blatant rip off your jaw drops. I received the presentation (attached to this post) last week - its about BPM and Mashups... from IBM. Basically IBM has taken everything - including our demo's - from our Lean BPM positioning. Far from being scared by this I'm actually delighted. They can get a level of scale on our message that we never could. Also, if you want some validation of our direction I think this says it all.
documentIBM - BPM and Mashups As-a-Service.pdf (4.7MB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/8848f31620
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyEvery now and then you come across something that is so much of a blatant rip off your jaw drops. I received the presentation (attached to this post) last week - its about BPM and Mashups... from IBM. Basically IBM has taken everything - including our demo's - from our Lean BPM positioning. Far from being scared by this I'm actually delighted. They can get a level of scale on our message that we never could. Also, if you want some validation of our direction I think this says it all.
documentIBM - BPM and Mashups As-a-Service.pdf (4.7MB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/8848f31620
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyEvery now and then you come across something that is so much of a blatant rip off your jaw drops. I received the presentation (attached to this post) last week - its about BPM and Mashups... from IBM. Basically IBM has taken everything - including our demo's - from our Lean BPM positioning. Far from being scared by this I'm actually delighted. They can get a level of scale on our message that we never could. Also, if you want some validation of our direction I think this says it all.
documentIBM - BPM and Mashups As-a-Service.pdf (4.7MB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/8848f31620
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyAJ Wood's turn this week for delivering phenomenal support to Nokia and helping their HR onboarding mashup go live - yep, its not just one of Ali's demo's... its real. Awesome job AJ!
Oh yeah, see the last sentence - the product isn't bad either!
On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 5:25 PM, wrote:
It seems we are almost finally there.
I owe each of you a BIG BIG BIG BIG Thank you. I know this was a bit more than any of us predicted it would be, but I really appreciate all your support, understanding, patience and knowledge. Most of you don't know the whole sorted story, but we have been fighting this Mashup battle in one way or another for 5 months now, so I felt pretty Mashed down until this evening. I finally see bright lights at the end of the tunnell. In my 15 years with Nokia, this has been the single most frustrating project due to political and budget challenges, but each of you stepped up to help make it a reality finally. It is an awsome tool and I am anxious to move forward with it.
I THANK EACH OF YOU MOST SINCERELY!
Genni
http://community.serena.com/posts/35b814c08a
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI've mentioned on a number of occassions that I believe our customer support is not only world class but a real differentiator for us. I'm in the fortunate position of seeing a lot of the really excellent work that goes on across the company and wanted to share this - its from the TeamTrack admin at Autozone. If you read nothing else (there's lots of techno-babble in here) then scroll down to the last paragraph. Fantastic. Great job Cindy, Bill and team!
---
Mr. Rosales,
I've written to you before regarding outstanding performance of a member of your staff; it was Cindy that time. Well, you must be doing something right because I'm writing you again.
To set the stage, here's a little background. A member of our staff in trying to do something a little different than what we want to do now had been told to run a script to get rid of a lot of high ASCII characters in our database. At that time our database was small and the script ran in approximately two hours. He was simply trying to refresh a QA database instance with data from production. Our production and QA databases were set to use the US-ASCII-7 character set while TeamTrack is set to use UTF-8. You can imagine the chaos and he was rightly told by Bill at the time that he needed to "cleanse" the data of these high ASCII characters because of the double conversion.
Now, we get to how Bill has saved us lots of time and has saved me a LOT of stress. This staff member of ours had emboldened into his mind that any time we pulled data from that production database to move it anywhere for any reason, we had to "cleanse" it with those scripts. I am a relatively new employee and am more familiar with Windows / SQL Server environments so I've been hesitant to raise objection since AutoZone uses Solaris / Oracle. Well, after three weeks of working with these scripts to "cleanse" our database so that we could move it to UTF-8 and upgrade it to Oracle 10 (from Oracle 9), I was at my wit's end this morning when the Copy Database utility utterly failed.
I happened on the Case that was originally filed with your support department and out of which came the idea that we needed to "cleanse" the data. The case was so long my boss came away with one thing and I came away with another. I saw the name Bill Gross on that case and knew I had to speak with Bill.
Bill is probably one of your escalation developer / analysts so I figured I wouldn't be able to reach him - I'm on that level myself and I hate the phone! Daniel placed me on hold after I begged to speak to Bill and after a minute, he came back and said Bill was hanging up and he would transfer me. Mr. Rosales, it took me more time to ask my question than it took Bill to answer it. While I'm still a bit perturbed that I have utterly wasted the last three weeks, that is my own company's fault and I'll deal with it. Without Bill to support my hypothesis today, I was against a brick wall. Bill very knowledgeably and very expertly gave exactly the answer that I had hoped for and had anticipated. The data cleanse is unnecessary. I can now have my database upgrade to Oracle 10 for testing in one day. The following weekend, assuming all tests pass, I'll be ready to upgrade my production database. And the following weekend, I'll be apply the patch 15 for TeamTrack. All of this puts me on schedule to upgrade to SBM as soon as we have some hardware in place. None of this would have been possible without Bill because I have chased my tail for the last three weeks and most certainly would have still been doing so if not for him.
I commend your company and you for having some of the most knowledgeable employees that I've had the privilege of working with. From Cindy to Bill, these guys are just EXCELLENT. I have been in this business since the late 80's and not once have I come across a company which took care of customers and made their skills as available to customers as Serena. I cannot tell you how proud I am to have learned about your company in this new job and how much I look forward to continuing to do business with you. You have a HUGE fan at AutoZone. As I've said before, your product makes me do business with your company, your service make me ENJOY doing business with your company. PLEASE don't ever lose this commitment to serving your customer.
Very Sincerely,
Michael Stevens
TeamTrack Support Admin
IT Change Management
AutoZone, Customer Satisfaction
http://community.serena.com/posts/0680b6939d
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI know I've had some gripes with Forrester's (or specifically Carey Schwaber's) view of the ALM market but here's an interesting article on "The Forrester Blog for CIO's". Seems like this "Lean" thing has legs!
http://community.serena.com/posts/92a720dc67
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodySBM 2009R1 is now officially GA. This is the release with the beautiful (Apple-like) new runtime interface. We've also made some substantial improvements to our licensing and license enforcement mechanism.
I still get lots of questions when I'm on the road about SBM licensing. Over the past year I've made it pretty clear that i hate concurrent licenses. Technically its meaningless in a web application and commercially it kills repeat business for SBM. Close to my hate for concurrent licenses is my hate for external requestor, anonymous submitter or anything else that allows a customer to eliminate the need to license fully large portions of their user population. Which leaves us with Named users. Named users are good because you can (usually) count them. But they've often gotten a bad rap because a) they're difficult to administer and b) in certain scenario's they're expensive.
So, in SBM 2009R1 we've tried to improve this. First "Named" licenses are now called "Seat" licenses. There is more than a name change involved in the improvement. In the past, an administrator would have to add a user name twice - once in SBM, and once in SLM (Serena License Manager) ... because every user name would consume a license. In the SBM2009R1 we don't check the "Name" associated with the license and so its a one step process. And that one-step can be zero step... becausein SBM2009R1 we also are offering auto-sync with LDAP directories.
As an aside, even if customers are running legacy concurrent licenses they still add a "Name" to SBM - remember users need to login to the mashup! So administering new Seat-based licenses is now easier than administering legacy Concurrent licenses.
Now, we haven't made any pricing changes. Seat licenses are the same price as Named licenses. And *everyone* who participates in the process flow must be licensed with a Seat license - there are no external requestor licenses in SBM2009R1.
I appreciate that, in some scenario's, our list price will be on the high end. But I firmly believe that discounting Seat licenses is an order of magnitude better for Serena than selling concurrent licenses and external requestor licenses. Lets get into a value conversation with the customer and understand what they have to spend... and we'll make the deal work.
By the way, there is an excellent online presentation (by Tim Zonca) of the changes here - log into the learning hub with your email address (but put SERENA in caps - weirdly its case sensitive) and use the password 'serena'. If you've not watched it then you should.
Finally, existing customers can continue to buy named & concurrent licenses the way they always have. One thing the may notice (particularly if they've got 10:1, 50:1 or 100:1 concurrency ratio's) is that their concurrent licenses don't go as far as they used to. Prior to this release the timeout parameter for our really smart concurrency algorithm (yes, we and everyone else just makes it up - there is no such thing as concurrency in a web application) was user configurable allowing admins to essentially set their own licensing policy. Now its hard coded to 60 minutes. Our concurrent price is 4x named for a reason - we expect 4:1 concurrency ratio's - not 100:1.
http://community.serena.com/posts/14dd224018
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyEvery quarter I am immensely proud of the work that so many of you do in the local community for Serena Gives Back. Not only are these activities appreciated by the community, they just make you feel good -right ? Better still, over time, we have an opportunity to establish giving back as an integral part of Serena's culture.
There are about 200 photo's of the day up on FaceBook already and I'm sure there are many more to come. There's also an excellent video that Rene & gang shot here.
One correction... I mentioned in my last company email that Carl would be taking pensioners money... infact, as you can see in the picture it was actually Ed Malysz.
Thank you all.
http://community.serena.com/posts/272523fd1b
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyThanks for your time at the all hands meeting last week - we had a record number of attendees live, approximately 350. Of course that still leaves 500 people to reach ... please find the replay here.
Key areas that you can find more information on are
1. Victory Plans - see here for the corporate plan i.e. mine. And you can find the departmental plans i.e. my directs here.
2. Five Plays For FY10 - see here for the brief description. And see here for more detail.
3. ALM Domain Excellence - see here for details. It includes Kevin Parkers excellent ALM Book.
And remember next time... no stars, just "Victory Plan Awards". Will you be a $5000 Gold Medal winner ?
http://community.serena.com/posts/58aed441c2
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyRBS - The Royal Bank Of Scotland recorded the biggest loss in UK corporate history on Thursday. On Friday, these signed a $2.2M deal for ZMF! There's a pretty convoluted story behind this one including a love quadrangle between La Salle, ABN Ambro, BofA and RBS ... but the agreement is signed and the cash will soon be in the bank. Great job Ian Gibbs, Donal Falvey and the entire International team.
http://community.serena.com/posts/970aaa41d7
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyRBS - The Royal Bank Of Scotland recorded the biggest loss in UK corporate history on Thursday. On Friday, these signed a $2.2M deal for ZMF! There's a pretty convoluted story behind this one including a love quadrangle between La Salle, ABN Ambro, BofA and RBS ... but the agreement is signed and the cash will soon be in the bank. Great job Ian Gibbs, Donal Falvey and the entire International team.
http://community.serena.com/posts/970aaa41d7
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyRBS - The Royal Bank Of Scotland recorded the biggest loss in UK corporate history on Thursday. On Friday, these signed a $2.2M deal for ZMF! There's a pretty convoluted story behind this one including a love quadrangle between La Salle, ABN Ambro, BofA and RBS ... but the agreement is signed and the cash will soon be in the bank. Great job Ian Gibbs, Donal Falvey and the entire International team.
http://community.serena.com/posts/970aaa41d7
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyToday is a historic day at Serena. We shipped Agile On-Demand - a brand new product to enable development teams practising agile to better manage their development projects. Its been a long time since we shipped a brand new, organically developed, product ... can anyone hazard a guess as to what the last one was ?
Back in January last year at my Executive Offsite (those were the days, when we could afford offsites) John Scumniotales presented a "Build vs Buy" analysis to the management team. We'd kicked the tires of Rally, Version One etc. and tried to get a good understanding of just how much technology they had, what the market opportunity was and whether or not we should even think about building an Agile offering. John told us he could get a Beta in nine months (at TAG) and a new product out the door in twelve. Well here we are pretty much twelve months later and we have a product - an absolutely spectacular effort by the entire AOD team up in Bellvue.
We already have a number of customers engaged with us from our Beta program and a handful who are already interested in buying. I am really excited to see what we can do with this new product as I think there will be plenty of "pull" for it - Agile is a hot topic in both ISV and IT circles.
We will be managing our ramp up carefully - for the initial rollout phase (between now and June) we will examine every request for trial... and closely monitor the on-demand service so we get a full understanding of customer perception - both for our product and the level of service we're offering. Our goal will be to build a strong reference base and ensure we deliver a great customer experience.
This new product is also unique in that we have struck up a partnership out of the gate in the key markets that we will offer AOD. Our partner is Valtech and the deal is quite simple - we deliver the Agile tools, they deliver the Agile transformation services. Valtech are an expert in this area and I believe they will proove to be extremely valuable in pitching complete "Agile Transformation" offerings to enterprise accounts.
Exciting times... to learn more, check out our beautiful new web pages here. By the way, did I mention that our new web site is awesome ? Check it out - we're giving Apple's UNIX page a run for its money with our new Mainframe pages - they only have green and black screens ... we've got cyan and black, magenta and black ... a whole rainbow going on. Check it out here ... I want to hear you say it "The Mainframe Is Cool Again"!!!!
http://community.serena.com/posts/893edc5c58
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyLast week was our Sales Kick Off down at the Hayes Mansion in San Jose. For the past three months we've been working to make sure that we enter FY10 as a lean, focused selling machine and SKO was the roll-out for our key programs. I've attached my powerpoint down below.
Day 1 and 2 of SKO was geared towards our Solution Architects, although a number of our reps also attended. Our SA's are key to our success. The person who dives in to understand how the customer actually builds software is the SA. The person who identifies the gaps in the customers development process and architects a Serena solution is the SA. The job of a Solution Architect is both tough and rewarding - if done properly. The job is technical and requires an understanding of all of our products. The job also requires an appreciation of process and business drivers.
My challenge this year to all SA's is to "get out your comfort zone". Can you conduct a half day discovery session with a development team ? Or do you call 1-800-SPECIALISTS ? Do you know Dimensions or SBM ? If so, that's OK, but not impressive. If you know both then you're in the game. But I'm challenging you to get up to speed with ARM, or Agile.
Day 3 and 4 were geared towards sales reps. The vast majority of the content was about the 5 plays- how we intend to go-to-market in FY10. For the first time we had sales reps and sales managers presenting. And they were presenting plays that were essentially developed by the sales teams (ok, with a little help from the marketing and R&D friends). I think that, on the whole, the material was well received - play 5 on Lean BPM coming out on top via the Clapometer. I think an added benefit was that our sales presenters got some insight into just what a tough audience the sales team is to present to - none tougher in my opinion!
I've got a challenge for our reps too. Get to the right person. This year, more than ever, we have to be brutal about qualifying our opportunities. Is there a strategic need ? Is the customer willing to spend money on the problem that we've identified ? Do we understand the approval process ? If we're not talking to a VP then I have no confidence we know the answer to any of these questions. If you're not passionate about this, if you don't strive to achieve this, if you haven't set goals around this... then there's a good chance you're going hungry this year.
I also spent quite a bit of time outlining our victory plan. You might remember about 18 months ago I announced that to get alignment behind the sales team we'd make FY08 "The Year of Sales". That was an emotional plea. The Victory Plan is not an emotional plea - it's a management tool. Our non-negotiables are written down there in black & white. For me, for the management team... for the Sales teams, Marketing teams, R&D and Support teams. We must take personal responsibility for our execution against the Victory Plan.
We also had a couple of extra-curricular activities that were just awesome. First, on Wednesday night we did a bike building challenge with the team - teams of ten answering MENSA questions to earn money and buy parts... which then assembled into a bike. The best bit though was that the bikes were for under-privileged kids from the Redwood City Boys & Girls Club ... and the kids came in to collect their new bikes the next day. What a great moment - the kids jumped off stage to grab their bikes with many proud "builders" holding back tears.
On Thursday the Serena Senior Management team put on "The Wizard of Oz". A good old-fashioned English pantomime style with men dressed up as errr.... women, amongst other things. Dame "Dorothy" Aloisio stole the show with his (her?) rendition of "Somewhere over the mainframe". Bob Pender put in strong performance as the "Wicked Witch of the West" (you can put that broomstick down now Bob) and Rene bounced back from his recent illness to star as Toto and a slightly disturbing Dancing Queen. No one will forget Eric Johnson'swardrobe malfunction... and i'll also never forget him asking if he could leave the dress on for bowling that evening. Other notables were Michael "Crooner" Lindner as Scarecrow, Carl Theobald as Tin Man and Kevin Kernanas the Lion. To see the full cast you'll need to see the video - which is under lock and key in Ed Malysz's office ... no - unlike the photo's it isn't appearing on FaceBook :-) By the way, to see the photo's you may need to friend "Andrew Brackensick"
All in all I thoroughly enjoyed SKO this year - it was absolutely great. Candidly, I think we cut a lot of the b/s and got back to basics. We're on the "Application Development" message 100%, we've got clear alignment around the 5 plays and we're tracking our execution against the Victory Plan goals. With a lot of hard work we'll have a good year - despite the economy.
Finally, congratulations to all our Sales Excellence Club winners, our Award winners and, last but not least, Michaline Todd and her team(no, the guy in the beard is not on her team!) for putting on a first class event on a very tight budget. You guys rock! By the way, Michaline's web team was also behind the fabulous new Serena.com. Bear in mind that they've just completed "Sprint 1". Expect new product pages to be along shortly - with the same great look & feel.
BTW, if you're looking for this years "Eagle" - Employee Of The Year - you'll have to wait until the All Hands Meeting in 2 weeks!documentSales Kick Off Keynote FY10 - Final.zip (5.3MB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/ee16f4b1e0
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyIn the image above, and attached to this blog posting in a Word document you will find a copy of our Serena FY10 Corporate Victory Plan. This plan contains the metrics that I will be using to manage our execution throughout this year. As I'm sure you will find when you read it, this Victory plan does not cover absolutely everything that will happen inside Serena during FY10. However, it covers what I would call the "non-negotiables" - the things that I deem as absolutely necessary in order for us to be successful in FY10.
Our Americas & International Sales organizations also have a Victory Plan. So does the Marketing and R&D team. Their plans are derived from this one and so are completely aligned. This year we will have all of our available resources working towards common goals. I'd recommend you print out your Victory Plan and stick it on your office wall... and on the ceiling of your bedroom. I want everyone thinking 100% about what is on their plan, 100% of the time - nothing else matters.
MBO components of management bonuses will be tied to Victory Plan deliverables - and there will be penalty for non-delivery. There will also be rewards for excellence. We must live and breathe this if we are to be successful.
What about Q4 ? Well, its over. I will cover this in detail in our all hands meeting in a few weeks so I won't spoil the fun. Needless to say it was a very tough quarter with the only bright spot being the European team who fought tooth and nail to deliver a very respectable number. Despite the oppressive selling environment I saw many, many people go the extra mile in the name of revenue - there was no shortage of efffort right until the end. It was great to see. Candidly, I think the best thing we can do with FY09 is learn a couple of lessons from our mistakes... and forget about it.
And FY10 ? It's here i.e. now. We have our Victory Plan, our 5 Plays lined up, our new training programs to rollout ... and our new Agile On-Demand product to go and sell. I am very much looking forward to this year even though the economic gloom looks set tol continue for a few more quarters. I believe we are more focussed as a company. I believe we are better aligned as a company ... and I believe we will execute better as a company.
It all starts this week at the Sales Kick Off.... see you there. And let me know if you have any questions about the Victory Plan.
documentSerena Victory Plan-Final.doc (227KB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/163b4afde2
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyIn the image above, and attached to this blog posting in a Word document you will find a copy of our Serena FY10 Corporate Victory Plan. This plan contains the metrics that I will be using to manage our execution throughout this year. As I'm sure you will find when you read it, this Victory plan does not cover absolutely everything that will happen inside Serena during FY10. However, it covers what I would call the "non-negotiables" - the things that I deem as absolutely necessary in order for us to be successful in FY10.
Our Americas & International Sales organizations also have a Victory Plan. So does the Marketing and R&D team. Their plans are derived from this one and so are completely aligned. This year we will have all of our available resources working towards common goals. I'd recommend you print out your Victory Plan and stick it on your office wall... and on the ceiling of your bedroom. I want everyone thinking 100% about what is on their plan, 100% of the time - nothing else matters.
MBO components of management bonuses will be tied to Victory Plan deliverables - and there will be penalty for non-delivery. There will also be rewards for excellence. We must live and breathe this if we are to be successful.
What about Q4 ? Well, its over. I will cover this in detail in our all hands meeting in a few weeks so I won't spoil the fun. Needless to say it was a very tough quarter with the only bright spot being the European team who fought tooth and nail to deliver a very respectable number. Despite the oppressive selling environment I saw many, many people go the extra mile in the name of revenue - there was no shortage of efffort right until the end. It was great to see. Candidly, I think the best thing we can do with FY09 is learn a couple of lessons from our mistakes... and forget about it.
And FY10 ? It's here i.e. now. We have our Victory Plan, our 5 Plays lined up, our new training programs to rollout ... and our new Agile On-Demand product to go and sell. I am very much looking forward to this year even though the economic gloom looks set tol continue for a few more quarters. I believe we are more focussed as a company. I believe we are better aligned as a company ... and I believe we will execute better as a company.
It all starts this week at the Sales Kick Off.... see you there. And let me know if you have any questions about the Victory Plan.documentSerena Victory Plan-Final.doc (227KB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/163b4afde2
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyIn the image above, and attached to this blog posting in a Word document you will find a copy of our Serena FY10 Corporate Victory Plan. This plan contains the metrics that I will be using to manage our execution throughout this year. As I'm sure you will find when you read it, this Victory plan does not cover absolutely everything that will happen inside Serena during FY10. However, it covers what I would call the "non-negotiables" - the things that I deem as absolutely necessary in order for us to be successful in FY10.
Our Americas & International Sales organizations also have a Victory Plan. So does the Marketing and R&D team. Their plans are derived from this one and so are completely aligned. This year we will have all of our available resources working towards common goals. I'd recommend you print out your Victory Plan and stick it on your office wall... and on the ceiling of your bedroom. I want everyone thinking 100% about what is on their plan, 100% of the time - nothing else matters.
MBO components of management bonuses will be tied to Victory Plan deliverables - and there will be penalty for non-delivery. There will also be rewards for excellence. We must live and breathe this if we are to be successful.
What about Q4 ? Well, its over. I will cover this in detail in our all hands meeting in a few weeks so I won't spoil the fun. Needless to say it was a very tough quarter with the only bright spot being the European team who fought tooth and nail to deliver a very respectable number. Despite the oppressive selling environment I saw many, many people go the extra mile in the name of revenue - there was no shortage of efffort right until the end. It was great to see. Candidly, I think the best thing we can do with FY09 is learn a couple of lessons from our mistakes... and forget about it.
And FY10 ? It's here i.e. now. We have our Victory Plan, our 5 Plays lined up, our new training programs to rollout ... and our new Agile On-Demand product to go and sell. I am very much looking forward to this year even though the economic gloom looks set tol continue for a few more quarters. I believe we are more focussed as a company. I believe we are better aligned as a company ... and I believe we will execute better as a company.
It all starts this week at the Sales Kick Off.... see you there. And let me know if you have any questions about the Victory Plan.documentSerena Victory Plan-Final.doc (227KB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/163b4afde2
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI'd never accuse Sun these days of being visionaries but I do find it interesting that almost 18 months after we began building cloud deployment into Mashup Composer their CTO comes up with this
Money quote:
"I think that we'll see the IDEs [Integrated Development Environments], the tools that developers use today will start to accommodate the capabilities of even building and deploying applications out into a cloud service provider,"
We are a little bit ahead of the curve with Mashup Composer and its SaaS deployment capabilities - that said, we have established a leadership position and over the next 12-24 months more and more people will come to realize that the "lean" development methodology for building and deploying collaborative, process-centric applications is the right one.
http://community.serena.com/posts/bb646f2359
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI'm pretty excited about the new web pages our marketing team are working on. Most all are in support of the "5 Plays" and will feature the very best of our products, customers and competitive differentiation. The one above is just in draft form, but expect live pages by SKO! Let me know what you think. I love them.
http://community.serena.com/posts/6a34188847
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonbodyIngersoll Rand migrated 15 VM projects totaling 19Gb into Dimensions using our migration utility. Mir has been all over this like a cheap suit. All issues found have been resolved and are included in our Dimensions 2009R1 release due in April.
The consulting report out is attached as a word doc. I'm sure I'm violating some rule or other so don't tell anyone, or if you do, tell them not tell anyone.
Let me hear you say it... "I believe"documentVM2DMEXP Migration.doc (41KB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/f7813082cf
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonbodyIngersoll Rand migrated 15 VM projects totaling 19Gb into Dimensions using our migration utility. Mir has been all over this like a cheap suit. All issues found have been resolved and are included in our Dimensions 2009R1 release due in April.
The consulting report out is attached as a word doc. I'm sure I'm violating some rule or other so don't tell anyone, or if you do, tell them not tell anyone.
Let me hear you say it... "I believe"documentVM2DMEXP Migration.doc (41KB)
http://community.serena.com/posts/f7813082cf
blog entry by Jeremy Burtonpicturebodyhttp://www.forbes.com/2008/12/14/technology-2009-predictions-sneakpeek_snkpk09_05_bruceupbin_technology.html
"Do-it-yourself corporate IT will gain in prominence. Companies like Google, Salesforce and Serena Software make it easy for departments to work through or around the IT staff to create lightweight applications and services on the fly to manage people, revenue and assets. It's cheap, based on Web standards and relatively easy to create for amateurs"
Not bad company to be in.
http://community.serena.com/posts/11c00fe914
blog entry by Jeremy Burtonpicturebodyhttp://www.forbes.com/2008/12/14/technology-2009-predictions-sneakpeek_snkpk09_05_bruceupbin_technology.html
"Do-it-yourself corporate IT will gain in prominence. Companies like Google, Salesforce and Serena Software make it easy for departments to work through or around the IT staff to create lightweight applications and services on the fly to manage people, revenue and assets. It's cheap, based on Web standards and relatively easy to create for amateurs"
Not bad company to be in.
http://community.serena.com/posts/11c00fe914
blog entry by Jeremy Burtonpicturebodyhttp://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/SOA-Wanted-Dead-or-Alive/
"SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM [business process management], SaaS , Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on 'services.'"
An interesting article to start the week with. We've said for quite some time that Mashups actually make SOA useful ... seems like many are starting to realize that without higher level 'value' the plumbing is not that useful. Personally I don't believe SOA is dead ... but i do believe that the SOA 'tail' will not be wagging the Mashup/BPM 'dog' for much longer.
http://community.serena.com/posts/2f6027c3f5
blog entry by Jeremy Burtonpicturebodyhttp://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/SOA-Wanted-Dead-or-Alive/
"SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM [business process management], SaaS , Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on 'services.'"
An interesting article to start the week with. We've said for quite some time that Mashups actually make SOA useful ... seems like many are starting to realize that without higher level 'value' the plumbing is not that useful. Personally I don't believe SOA is dead ... but i do believe that the SOA 'tail' will not be wagging the Mashup/BPM 'dog' for much longer.
http://community.serena.com/posts/2f6027c3f5
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyGiven the efficiency of the rumor mill around here I'm sure many of you have heard about the development of a Serena "Victory Plan". I guarantee that you will be sick of the sight of the Victory Plan within a very short period of time but I wanted to answer the top 5 questions I hear being asked about it.
Q. What is "The Serena Victory Plan" ?
A. The "Victory Plan" is an alignment tool. I want the entire company stacked up behind the key things that will make Serena successful in FY10 and beyond. I've worked with the Serena executive team to write down what those "key things" are and how we will measure them next year. That is the real substance of the Victory Plan.
Q. How will some 'pie-in-the-sky' Serena executive Victory Plan affect me ?
A. The top level Serena Victory Plan is for me to manage my management team. At each level of management in Carl, Rene, Michael & Kevin's organization we will develop a Victory Plan that a) contains goals & tactics relevant to their teams and b) logically rolls up to my top level Victory Plan. You will be managed by your managers Victory Plan ... not by mine.
Q. Is this another management fad that we use for one quarter and then forget about ?
A. I will brief you on the Victory Plan at the all hands meeting in February. I will then update you on our execution against the Victory Plan goals and metrics at each subsequent meeting. I will be politely (?) encouraging managers to do likewise with their Victory Plans. This is not a management fad, its a way of life. I will personally be driving it and I expect everyone to take responsibility for execution against it.
Q. Why don't Ed, Bob & Alison have a Victory Plan ?
A. They will, in good time. I wanted to focus first on our key go-to-market functions!
Q. Where is the "Serena Victory Plan"
A. It will be published here on February 1st - the first day of FY10.
http://community.serena.com/posts/f5c8d24696
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyI'd like to wish you all a collective Happy New Year, I hope you had a great holiday season and are coming back to work raring to go!The beginning of any new year is always a great opportunity for reflection and for many 2008 will go down as a year to remember for all the wrong reasons. The faltering economy has touched almost every industry and every part of the world... and is showing no sign of recovery. For Serena, 2008 started brightly - growing revenue and getting into the SaaS business. Sadly we too were proven to be exposed to the recession and encountered a very tough selling environment in the back half of Q3 and into Q4. I'm not sure about you, but I much prefer to look forward than look back. We have a new year ahead of us and a new year always brings new resolutions and new hope! First of all we need to finish off FY09. January is the most important month of our fiscal year with many large deals in play all around the world. If you are in a quota carrying position then I need you to deliver on your revenue commitments - we must close out FY09 strongly and build a platform for growth in FY10. I am very excited about FY10. We've had cross functional teams working for two months on our "Five Plays" for FY10 - this is our most important go-to-market initiative of the year and I expect everybody to align behind them. In the last month we have formulated a company "Victory Plan" which defines our key goals for the year, and the metrics I intend to track along the way... and by Feb 1 each of our major functional teams will also have their own Victory Plan and associated goals and metrics. Finally, we are rolling out new "ALM Domain Excellence" and onboarding training to better equip our sales teams to converse with Application Development professionals. The economic environment is not likely to improve dramatically in the next few quarters so we must focus on the things that we can do better to improve our revenue numbers. I know that if we get the power of Serena aligned behind a small number of activities, we get our sales teams delivering a compelling value proposition to app dev professionals and we're very transparent with our progress against well defined goals then we can, and will, do very well. Finally, 2009 promises to be exciting for us from a product perspective. We've just GA'd our biggest ZMF release ("Holyrood") in years - widening the gap between ourselves and CA. We're about to introduce Serena's first organically developed product in years with the release of Agile On-Demand in February - traditional competitors like IBM Rational & Borland have nothing like it. And, for good measure, we have major new releases of Serena Business Mashups, Dimensions and Mariner in the first half. Lets take the fight to the competition in 2009!
http://community.serena.com/posts/9403701d05
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyOn the way back from Europe I made a stop in St Louis via Chicago. I knew things were bad when I got to Chicago and they announced a temperature of 18F. In St Louis it was colder - more like 14F and with 3-4 inches of snow. Funnily enough I was visiting Monsanto - the same place I visited back in March of last year when is was freezing with ... 3 inches of snow on the ground. Note to self...
The Monsanto meeting was pretty interesting and there were many lessons for us to learn. First, we are fairly well entrenched in Monsanto's App Dev teams - our Issue & Defect Management Application is used throughout their development teams - the applications is stable and well liked. Ali & the SBM team did a great job with these guys about a year ago right before we did a $500K NLR deal. The good news is that there may be another few hundred K in licenses as they continue their rollout.
The bad news is that Monsanto's Data Center Automation intiative has expanded to the point where it could represent a long term threat to our IDM footprint. HP & BMC have both pitched Monsanto on an integrated Systems Mgmt (Openview / Patrol), Data Center Automation (Opsware / Bladelogic), Helpdesk (ServiceDesk / Remedy) offering for many (many) millions of dollars. The latter part of this pitch (Helpdesk) could, over time, bump into defect tracking within the development teams... which of course is our domain. The opportunity for SBM is to win the Helpdesk part of this deal in the Data Center and integrate with the systems mgmt and data center automation tool. I was actually staggered to find a company taking on a project of this magnitude in the current economic environment, although Monsanto is doing very well right now.
After Monsanto, I moved on to cold(er) and snow(ier) Kansas City for a dinner meeting with DST systems. This looks like being a Q4 deal for Dimensions and a potential opportunity for Agile On-Demand. This has been a fierce battle between Dimensions and Subversion ... and it looks like we're now in the driving seat. This account is also an existing PVCS customer and so, if we're successful, this could be a nice PVCS to Dimensions migration reference for our "Play 1"
http://community.serena.com/posts/3901ff51ec
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyChristmas is always a good time to head to Europe - not that Christmas isn't good in the US, but Thanksgiving tends to take over as "the main event". Christmas (or "The Holidays", as the political correctness committee will insist) is often relegated to an also-ran.
That said, I'd forgotten how cold and miserable it is in England this time of year. I got the early afternoon flight out of San Francisco on Sunday and arrived at Heathrow 6am on Monday - it was down around freezing point and I had to be out at a customer at 9am... still, stiff upper lip an' all that.
I arrived over at Aviva with Nick Aves to meet about a PPM opportunity. Aviva is turning out to be a pretty good Dimensions & SBM customer (as is evidenced by several deals this quarter) but sadly not PPM - we were beaten out by CA Clarity in this opportunity. Key decision came down to ease of use and perception of the end users, although Aviva were quick to point out that it was very, very close.
That evening we had a CIO dinner at Tower 42 in London - now, you may be thinking "exactly how much are you going to see 42 stories up on London in mid-December. Usually London is shrouded in a blanket of fog from October through March which is why everyone is miserable. As luck would have it we got a crystal clear evening and you could see for miles. Dinner was well attended by 6-8 senior IT folks, some customers, some prospects and the topic for debate over dinner was Kevin Parker's white paper on "The future of app dev". These events follow the basic format of 'punch the dinner guests between the eyes and see what comes back' ... so we hit them with SaaS, then Agile... and Mashups. All in all a really excellent discussion and we really struggled to get rid of our customers by 11pm.
Tuesday, I headed over to meet with Ian Gibbs and Donal Falvey for a quick call on Deutsche Bank. We have a very strong advocate at Deutsche who went against company policy and used SBM to automate a process flow for German Tax Withholding such was his belief in the value of our toolset. The corporate standard for BPM is TIBCO - but is heavyweight, complex and slow. Anyway, we've done a good job building out the mashup for them - its not what I would call "right up our strike zone" as its heavy on system orchestrations vs. human workflow, but nevertheless its build and we're moving towards production on Jan 1. If we can make Deutsche successful then I believe we will do very well here next year. Thanks to Ali, Kartik, Peter, Donal and everyone cranking away on this account - you are making a difference and we will make these guys successful.
After a quick visit up to Rolls Royce in Derby I headed out to Germany to connect with Tosten & Dieter in Cologne. We've got some great things going on in the Defence sector of the German Government - its taken us a while to build the influence we now have but its starting to pay off in meaningful sized deals with the German Army & EADS. Much of this work revolves around Dimensions CM & RM - good old fashioned software change management! One of our key goals here is not so much new features but improving our out-of-the-box experience and product quality. We made great strides in this direction with our 10.1.4 release, reducing the defect backlog by half, but we still have to keep at it. I'm expecting great things from the Central team and Dimensions in FY10.
My final call over in Germany was at CommerzBank in Frankfurt - like most financial institutions this bank is in a state of chaos because of the economy, but also because of the merger they are currently going through. That said, merger = process change and we have the best process tool bar none to help out. We have plenty of work to do in this account but they definitely have process pain, and we can definitely help them with SBM.
Before heading back to the US (via the Mid-West... that report coming next) I stopped by Paris where Michael Lindner was assembling his International management team for the first time. As some of you may have heard, we are assembling "Victory Plans" for each Serena team so we can align our efforts behind one set of goals - the International team was together to work on their Victory Plan. I will post the top level plan here in the coming weeks... its not a secret!
Next up... the freezing mid-west and our victory plan
http://community.serena.com/posts/e86c22293d
blog entry by Jeremy BurtonpicturebodyOn the all hands call I mentioned that we would be putting our company emphasis on Application Development. In fact, our mission in life will be quite simply to help IT departments lower costs by improving their Application Development processes. That's a very important and very relevant mission given the current economic climate.
Now the hard bit, how do we execute on this mission ?
Well, first, we need a game plan. Whether you watch American Football or "Real" Football, you know that "your team" must have a solid game plan in order to be successful. You simply can't wander into a game at the top level and hope to be successful - hope is not a strategy. A solid game plan must exploit your teams strengths and must expose the weaknesses of the opposition. And, most importantly, every member of the team must be on the same page - individuals executing on their own in the middle of the game simply doesn't work.
Our game plan is going to be based around 5 sales plays. We will begin execution on these plays in early February and will be rolling them out at SKO. We determined these plays by assembling some of our best and brightest field resources and picking their brains for 2 days. We asked, quite simply, "What are we best at selling ?" and "Where are the biggest opportunities ?" ... and we then proceeded to outline how we could get every sales resource up to speed ... and every go to market resource aligned behind the effort.
Our 5 plays are
1. VM (or anything else) to Dimensions (Ash Own, Kevin Kernan)How do we get the top 150 VM customers educated & migrated to Dimensions. If we have CVS, Perforce or Subversion in play how do we consolidate and standardize the SCM processes globally ?2. Development Process Management (Donal Falvey, Michael Lindner)How do we add value on top of SCM ? Not just Dimensions, but anything else ? How can we standardize, automate and provide visibility into higher level development processes to reduce IT costs ?3. Release Management (Nathan Rawlines, Chris Schwartz, Eric Driffort)How do we attack our ZMF base to automate release approval and audit ? How do we expand that to cover distributed environments ? How do use Dimensions as the "final staging post" before production ?
4. Agile (Patchen Noelke, Rene Bonvanie, John Scumniotales)How do we establish a beach head in the brave new world of Agile ?
5. Business Process Improvement (Michael Parker, Kevin Kernan)How do we enable Application Development teams to improve their productivity by an order of magnitude ? How do we do for collaborative apps what Visual Basic did for transactional apps ?You will see above that each play has a primary owner (first name in parens) and one or two executive sponsors. The play owner will be driving many deliverables for each play, such as ROI tools, customer references, competitive materials etc. and many of you may be asked to chime in or help manage a project. If you are asked the answer is "yes" - apart from closing Q4 business this is *the* most important activity that we have going on and we must complete the preparation work so we can move to execution ASAP.
I want all resources and activities stacked up behind these plays for FY10 - our success will be directly proportional to just how aligned we are and just how much wood we have behind these few arrows. All these plays are right up our Application Development strike zone and so we have no excuses - we can be successful here if we focus.Coming next... how do we measure our success ?
http://community.serena.com/posts/55a29d8479
Update Sources
