Serena Software has added several new features to its application lifecycle management (ALM) suite, including an entirely new application called Serena Demand Manager. The big change here is that Serena is now including both its Orchestrated ALM and its Orchestrated Ops family of products under a single umbrella called “Orchestrated IT.”

Serena has been around since 1980 and is perhaps best known for selling change management solutions for mainframe computing environments. In recent years it’s been trying to update its image by embracing agile development, and DevOps is the latest piece of that puzzle.

The Orchestrated IT Dashboard provides managers in both development and operations with a unified dashboard that includes “almost two dozen pre-defined metrics like cycle times, queue sizes, wait times and SLA performance.” It also provides support for adding information from non-Serena software into the dashboard in an attempt to make it the single source of truth for IT decision makers across silos.

Serena Demand Management is a tool to help IT teams prioritize resources and manage approvals, again across silos. Here’s a screenshot:

The company also pushed new features for existing components of the suite, including Serena Requirements Manager.

We’re starting to see more interest in DevOps from established IT management companies, such as IBM Tivoli and UC4. However, it’s too early to tell if companies like Serena are in this for the long haul, or just latching on to another buzzword in an attempt to stay relevant in a changing IT environment.

But even though clusters of commodity servers are replacing mainframes at many enterprises, many other enterprises around the world are still managing COBOL application on mainframes. Serena has an interesting opportunity to bring DevOps practices to its existing large enterprise custom base and help them make the transition from legacy to agility. The new features are great news for existing Serena customers wanting to make a go of DevOps but unsure of how to make it work. It will be very interesting to see if this catches on with Serena’s enterprise customers.