Tarswar's Weblog

Legal eagles soar as markets crash

tarswar — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:35:52 +0000

NEW DELHI: While BPO companies are feeling the heat of the global meltdown and resorting to layoffs and other cost cutting measures, their LPO (legal process outsourcing) counterparts are thriving like never before because of the legal activity that has been generated by the sub-prime crisis in US. What is more, the LPO segment reflects the prevailing boom in the legal services industry in India.

Law firms dealing with foreign companies operating in India have also seen an increase in their turnover, even if their work is now more about post-meltdown issues like restructuring, downsizing, layoffs, closure of branches, winding up of subsidiaries and termination notices to collaborators and franchisees.

Take the example of Delhi-based Titus & Co, whose clientele consists almost entirely of foreign companies and governments. Its managing partner Diljeet Titus said, “We have had at least a 50% rise in the volume of transactional work ever since Lehman Brothers imploded two months ago.” Since these transactions are mostly related to cost-cutting measures, Titus did his bit for his clients by offering a 20% discount in his fee. “The reduction in our fee is made up for by the increase in the quantum of work as well as the dollar rate,” he added.

Fox Mandal Little, the largest law firm in the country, displays more signs of it being business-as-usual. In the last two months, it has recruited 27 more lawyers at various levels, opened its 13th office (which is in Kochi) and forged ahead with negotiations to acquire another law firm. It is poised to recruit more lawyers for its recently launched LPO subsidiary, Legal Circle. The firm’s managing partner Som Mandal said, “We are most bullish about our LPO because of the sheer deluge of enquiries we have received from US to do litigation support from India.”

The timing of the meltdown could not have been better for LPO companies as the e-discovery law, governing the storage and management of electronic data that might be relevant to litigation, came into effect in US only two years ago. The meltdown has forced more American companies to turn to LPO set-ups in India for help because of the enormous cost differential. For performing document review, a key aspect of the e-discovery process, a senior associate in US is paid $200-300 per hour while an LPO based in India charges barely $25-30 per hour for the same work, according to Mandal’s estimate.

Not surprisingly, Pangea3, one of India’s largest LPO companies, claims to have registered 100% increase in volumes in the last six months. “We are witnessing an extraordinary influx of work directly or indirectly related to the sub-prime crisis,” said CEO Sanjay Kamlani. The surge in Pangea3′s e-discovery work involves court disputes among investors, lenders, borrowers, homeowners and banks. Post-meltdown, it is also cashing in on the demand for greater scrutiny of financial transactions and corporate governance.

As Pangea3 CEO Sanjay Kamlani put it, “cost cutting measures have spared budgets only for non-discretionary items like legal services related to litigations and regulatory compliance. While BPOs must deal with delayed decision making, uncertainty and wait for new government policies in US, LPOs grow business almost as a function of the slowdown.”

For all the surge in business for LPOs and law firms, there is one part of the legal services industry that seems to have remained relatively unaffected: the vast majority of individual lawyers involved in litigation within the country. P H Parekh, president of Supreme Court bar association, dismissed the suggestion that senior advocates like him were under pressure to accept a fee cut in view of the economic slump. “The demand for top lawyers is so high and the supply of them so little, the worst that may happen is that the number of briefs we return for want of time may come down,” Parekh said.

NComputing Provides 1.8M Andhra Pradesh Students With Computer Access

tarswar — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:45:10 +0000

NComputing has been chosen to supply a massive 5,000-school educational computing initiative in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The initiative will provide computing access to 1.8 million children throughout the state. Andhra Pradesh is the largest and most populous state in South India. Andhra Pradesh will contract leading education IT firms to build the computer labs in 5,000 schools totaling 50,000 computing seats over the coming few months. The win marks the largest single deployment of NComputing’s solution in India. The decision to deploy NComputing’s low-cost and eco-friendly solution establishes the government of Andhra Pradesh as an innovator in educational computing and provides a blueprint for other governments and institutions considering similar projects.

By leveraging NComputing, the government will save $20 million in up-front and ongoing costs. The government will also use 90% less electricity compared to a traditional all-PC solution. “NComputing is proud to have been chosen by Andhra Pradesh to fulfill its vision to improve learning and computer literacy throughout the state,” said Stephen Dukker, chairman and CEO of NComputing. “At about $70 per seat, our solution is the ideal platform to enable schools, businesses, and governments to maximize their PC investment. We are the world leader in desktop virtualization and the scale of this deployment further extends our leadership position.”

The NComputing solution is based on a simple fact: today’s PCs are so powerful that the vast majority of applications only use a small fraction of the computer’s capacity. NComputing technology creates multiple virtual desktops on a single PC so that many users can tap the unused capacity and share it as if each person had their own computer. Andhra Pradesh chose the NComputing X300 solution, which enables up to seven users to simultaneously share one PC.

The computing labs will be used to teach computer skills and office productivity (spreadsheets, word processing) as well as subjects like reading and math. The entire system will run on the Microsoft Windows Server operating system and use Microsoft Office Suite. “India holds a strong position in the knowledge economy today due to the country’s consistent investment in education over the years,” said Javier Arrupea Gitlin, director, Microsoft Unlimited Potential Group. “In India and around the globe, Microsoft is committed to enabling affordable access to computing for education. Through Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential commitment, we are continually looking for innovative and affordable technology solutions that can sustain social and economic progress. Initiatives such as this announced today that leverage the value to educational computing provided by the Windows Server platform represent yet another solution that can help move us towards this goal.”

“With the modernization of India’s economy, students are eager to learn the computer skills that will prepare them for the digital workplace – but most government school students have never even had the chance to type on a keyboard or click a mouse,” said Mr. Raj Shah, chief marketing officer of NComputing, “This computerization project shows how forward thinking governments can use proven and practical technologies like NComputing to bridge the digital divide.”

The project is based on an innovative outsourcing model. The Andhra Pradesh government will outsource the entire project for five years to leading educational IT companies, including Educomp, Everonn, NIIT, and Social Computers. The model is referred to as Build, Operate, and Transfer (BOT) and requires the companies to install, staff, and manage the labs. This arrangement helps ensure that the labs are installed quickly and performance benchmarks are met. The five-year period also enables school staff to develop their own competencies in managing the labs and computer-aided teaching.

NComputing’s technology is used by 20,000 organizations in more than 90 countries. In the United States, NComputing has been deployed by over 4,000 school districts in classrooms, computer labs, and libraries. Although smaller in scale than Andhra Pradesh, school districts in North America face many of the same challenges including tight budgets, demand for wider computing access, limited IT support staff, and a desire to use “green” technology.

NComputing uses just 1 watt of electricity (compared to 110 watts or more for stand-alone PCs). “Our students are learning about global warming and increasingly engaged in school initiatives to lower the carbon footprint,” said Richard Potter of Medicine Hat School District. “We rebuilt our computer lab with NComputing and a few PCs and the students planted a hundred trees to create a carbon-neutral computer lab.”

NComputing recently announced that Will Poole, former corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, has joined as co-chairman.

Serena Software Acquires Open Source Alternative to Microsoft Project

tarswar — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:33:13 +0000

Bangalore, September 24th, 2008 — Serena Software has acquired Projity for OpenProj, its free, open source desktop project management software, and Project-ON-Demand, its Software as a Service (SaaS)-based project management software. With this acquisition, Serena significantly bolsters its Serena® Mariner® Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) offering. Serena Mariner was rated by Forrester as a leader in the The Forrester Wave™: Project Portfolio Management Tools, Q4 2007 (December 2007) with “top-of-the-line portfolio management software, robust reporting, and a unique implementation road map process.”

Serena Mariner provides total visibility into project and portfolio status and metrics to ensure the right people are on the right projects at the right time, ultimately delivering more value to the business. With the addition of the Projity offerings, Serena Mariner gains both an alternative to Microsoft Project as well as high fidelity bi-directional integration.

Open Source Project Management

OpenProj is an open source desktop project management application available under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) for individual project managers to download free of charge. OpenProj offers similar functionality as Microsoft Project — with support for multiple platforms. The success of OpenProj, with more than 600,000 downloads in 142 countries over the last year alone, shows there is considerable market opportunity for an open source alternative to commercial desktop project management applications. OpenProj is available for Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Unix, compatible with Microsoft Project files, available in 11 languages, and designed to work with leading open source office suites including Sun’s StarOffice, IBM Symphony, and OpenOffice.org, which boasts 100 million users.

On Demand Project Management

Project-ON-Demand is for small- to medium-sized organizations (SMBs) where several users collaborate on multiple group projects. Project-ON-Demand is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that eliminates the complexity of deploying Microsoft Project for large, geographically dispersed teams. It builds on the functionality in OpenProj by delivering additional multi-project, collaboration, reporting, and management features for a small subscription fee. Companies around the world are using Project-ON-Demand, including Corning, Sun and Wincor Nixdorf, and many others.

Project and Portfolio Management

Ultimately, Serena will integrate Project-ON-Demand’s robust project management capabilities into Serena Mariner, the company’s enterprise-level PPM offering, to give customers a broad view of project and portfolio status across their department or entire organization.

“Strong project management support is a critical part of our PPM strategy,” said Jeremy Burton, CEO, Serena Software. “The addition of Projity brings our customers not only a viable functional alternative to Microsoft Project, but first and foremost a much stronger PPM offering on demand.”

Availability and Pricing

Serena will continue to offer OpenProj through open source under the name Serena OpenProj. Project-ON-Demand is available immediately as Serena Projects On Demand and is priced starting at $10 per user per month. Serena Mariner 2008 is available now for on premise and on demand implementations. Pricing for Mariner 2008 On Demand is as low as $18 per user per month. The integrated Serena / Projity product will be available in the first quarter of 2009. For more information about the expanded Serena PPM product line, visit www.serena.com/projity.

About Serena Software, Inc.
Serena is a privately owned company, headquartered in Redwood City, California, with 29 offices in 14 countries and more than 800 employees. Serena provides software on premise and on demand to over 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100. Serena enables teams of programmers to become more efficient by standardizing and automating development processes across both mainframe and distributed environments. Serena enables IT business analysts and power users to improve productivity with a new generation of Web 2.0 tools to build Business Mashups. Serena Business Mashups can be used to automate common, everyday processes; they are visual and do not require coding. Serena also enables IT executives to gain visibility into their projects, resources and costs – CIOs should have access to the same quality of information about IT as the CFO has about Finance. For more information on Serena, visit http://www.serena.com.

Serena Software Joins Valtech in Agile Software Development Services Partnership

tarswar — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:31:03 +0000

Bangalore, 12th August, 2008 — A new partnership announced today between application lifecycle management (ALM) leader Serena Software and Valtech, a global provider of strategic software consulting, lean and agile-focused software engineering, skills training and coaching, promises to usher in a new era of Agile software development in the enterprise. Building on its commitment to support the exponential growth of Agile methodologies in the enterprise, Serena is combining its enterprise IT tool-making expertise with Valtech’s transformation, coaching and education techniques to help corporate employees make use of Agile processes quickly and on-demand, without extensive prior training.

Agile is an iterative software development methodology that promotes team collaboration and adaptability throughout a project lifecycle. It’s faster and more responsive than the traditional waterfall model, which takes a purely sequential approach to creating software. As a result, Agile developers deliver software that more closely matches actual customer needs more quickly, since “user stories” replace “specs” in the application development process.

“Agile development methodologies are seeing tremendous adoption in ISVs and IT departments of all sizes,” said Jeremy Burton, CEO of Serena. “We are committed to delivering a pure-Agile toolset via SaaS later this year and are delighted to have Valtech as our partner of choice as we roll that toolset out to market.”

Attendees of the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto (http://www.agile2008.org/) will be able to experience the new partnership firsthand at the “Agile Story Corps Booth,” where conference goers can record personal stories about their Agile experiences. These stories will influence support for Agile in Serena products and services. An extension of the Agile methodology Serena uses to develop products, Agile Story Corps is a way to incorporate users as a part of the development team. This allows Serena products to better meet the needs of its users.

Serena will also be sponsoring free Agile training at the Serena TAG conference taking place September 10-11 in Santa Clara, California.

“Valtech enables organizations to leapfrog the endemic challenges that early Agile and Lean adopters have encountered when attempting to catalyze strategic organizational and personal change within the software and product development lifecycle. A focus on developer adoption without an equal focus on corporate and business alignment has consistently proved ineffective,” said Brad Murphy, CEO of Valtech North America.”

“Valtech’s OnDemand Learning, Training and Organizational change programs identify only those Agile and Lean outcomes that organizations can and should adopt–and do so in ways that lead to quick wins crucial to winning support for sustaining the outcomes that Agile and Lean can provide,” Murphy said. “Together, Serena and Valtech will ensure that business stakeholders, product owners and engineering teams can all equally succeed at acquiring the skill and value that Agile tools and best practices offer across the entire software and product development team while moving quickly to adoption and showing a compelling business return.”

Serena and Valtech jointly will support Serena Agile development tools with training and documentation delivered in a variety of flexible formats, including:

· On Demand: tools and process training for individuals over the Web through the Serena community at http://community.serena.com

· Just in time: 10-minute task-specific training for individuals to help beef up skills before taking a specific step; and

· Traditional training: available as needed.

About Valtech

Valtech is a global provider of high performance enterprise software development, outsourcing, and organizational transformation services. Valtech offers strategic software consulting, lean and agile-focused software engineering, skills training and coaching. The company partners with customers as no development company dares to, by sharing the risk and return of development. Valtech’s OnDemand services are focused on one single outcome: Delivering business agility. Serving customers across a variety of industries, including finance, travel, energy, media, high-tech and online, Valtech OnDemand offerings result in priority business ideas and products converted to working, tested and deployable software every two weeks. Headquartered in Dallas, Valtech North America is a leading member of the Agile Alliance and Agile Project Leadership Network. For more information, please visit http://www.valtech.us/us/index.html

About Serena Software, Inc.
Serena is a privately owned company, headquartered in Redwood City, California, with 29 offices in 14 countries and almost 1,000 employees. Serena provides software on premise and on demand to over 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100. Serena enables teams of programmers to become more efficient by standardizing and automating development processes across both mainframe and distributed environments. Serena enables IT business analysts and power users to improve productivity with a new generation of Web 2.0 tools to build Business Mashups. Business Mashups automate common, everyday processes, are visual and do not require coding. Serena also enables IT executives to gain visibility into their projects, resources and costs – CIO’s should have access to the same quality of information about IT as the CFO has about Finance. For more information on Serena, visit http://www.serena.com/

Serena Software Unveils Dimensions RM 10.1.4 for Streamlined Requirements Definition

tarswar — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:30:23 +0000

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

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

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

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

What’s New in Dimensions 10.1.4:

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

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

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

About Serena Software

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

Serena Software Drives ALM Innovation with New Mashup for Application Release Management

tarswar — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:40:46 +0000

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

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

Automated Release Management for Mainframe Software Development

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

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

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

More Mashups – For ALM and Other Business Workflows

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

· Issue Tracking

· Request to Test

· Agile Backlog

· Change requests

· Hardware and Software Changes

· Demand Management.

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

Serena’s ALM Leadership

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

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

Mashups Meet Widgets in New Serena Mashup Composer

tarswar — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:14:00 +0000

Bangalore, June 12^th, 2008 — Mashups are an increasingly popular enterprise tool. In fact, Forrester projects that the enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013 in a May 2008 report called “The Mashup Opportunity.” To capitalize on this momentum, business users are now looking to blend more consumer information and easy-to-use widgets into their workplace mashups. Serena Software is responding to this demand with a new version of Serena® Mashup Composer™ that lets users simply drag and drop widgets, RSS feeds, Flash components and more into their Business Mashups. The resulting Rich Interface Mashups™ (RIMs) show that consumer data and social graphs are finally finding their niche in the workplace.

Imagine a scenario where a sales rep is preparing for a big meeting with a new customer. The rep might start with the customer’s record in salesforce.com, and have the mashup fetch related information like a photo and details from the customer’s LinkedIn [one word] or Facebook profile, external news feeds showing the company’s latest stock price, credit report information from a Dun & Bradstreet Web service, and widgets showing local weather and traffic in the customer’s location. Soon the rep has all the information needed for the meeting. It’s as easy as personalizing a Yahoo! home page.

The best part is that this mashup can be reused for other meetings, saving users the time and effort of visiting multiple data sources again and again for the same information. The mashup is a visual representation that stays the same while the data is dynamic and changes according to specific user needs (like which customer the rep is visiting in which city, in the scenario above).

“Consumer data, widgets, social graphs and mashups have finally found a legitimate purpose in the enterprise,” said Rene Bonvanie, SVP, Global Marketing, Partnerships and Online Services, Serena Software. “With Serena Mashup Composer, any data from any source – whether it has SOA hooks or not – is now mashable. We’re entering a brave new work world where individuals are empowered to create new business applications that work for them and that make their lives easier.”

The Last Mile of Customization

Serena Mashup Composer will consume and mix any kind of widget or Rich Internet Application (RIA), including: Adobe Flash, Amazon Search, Flickr, Microsoft Silverlight, RSS feeds, YouTube, any of the 30,000 Google Gadgets (such as calendars and maps), and more.

These can be mashed with business processes and data from internal applications (such as salesforce.com, Siebel, Oracle, and more) and any Web-based services to create Rich Interface Mashups that can be delivered on demand with a single click.

Serena Rich Interface Mashups are a boon for business users and IT professionals alike. While business workers benefit from being able to quickly build the mashups they need to do their jobs more effectively, IT pros are no longer burdened with countless requests for new applications. With Serena’s proven governance framework that provides the reliability, security and compliance that IT requires, IT is free to focus on the core infrastructure and architecture needs of the company.

Pricing and Availability

The latest iteration of Serena Mashup Composer, with services and support, will be available free of charge as part of Serena’s on-demand release in the third quarter of 2008.

Online Demos and Materials

· Flash demo of Serena Rich Interface Mashups: http://video.serena.marketbright.com/mashups/AR-PR/RIM_quick_demo.htm

· Video interview with Tim Zonca, director of product marketing for Serena Business Mashups: http://video.serena.com/mashups/AR-PR/TZ.6jun2008.render2.wmv

· Screen shot of Serena Mashup Composer: http://www.serena.com/mashups/AR-PR/RIM-Mashup-Composer.png

· Screen shot of Rich Interface Mashup: http://www.serena.com/mashups/AR-PR/RIM-Mashup-Preview.png

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

QUEST SOFTWARE SUPPORTS MICROSOFT WITH THE RELEASE OF ENHANCED PRODUCTS TO MANAGE SQL SERVER ENVIRONMENTS

tarswar — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:45:44 +0000

Bangalore, June 11, 2008 – Quest Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: QSFT), today announced the release of two products that will enable customers to manage growth and change in SQL Server environments. Capacity Manager for SQL Server 2.5 enables better control of disk space, growth rates and database performance, while Change Director for SQL Server permits easier implementation and control of enterprise-wide changes.

“In many organizations, SQL Server professionals are charged with both developing and managing their environments,” said Billy Bosworth, vice president and general manager of Quest’s SQL Server business unit. “The latest releases of these tools, along with other Quest SQL Server solutions, help organizations maximize return on investment while lowering total cost of ownership.”

Capacity Manager for SQL Server 2.5 offers capacity planning for SQL Server databases and the applications they support, such as SharePoint. Database administrators (DBAs) now have a centralized console that provides a holistic view of capacity across the database so they can see past and present events, and predict future growth trends.

-more-

In addition, Capacity Manager offers intelligent index maintenance to ensure rebuilding takes place during appropriate windows of time so performance is not impacted, and simplifies table partitioning to improve the performance of the database. It also collects data constantly through integration with Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise’s data repository to make sure that information is on hand for consolidation projects, and offers advice as to which servers would be good candidates for consolidation. For more information about consolidation and details on

Quest’s recently published consolidation guide (see related release), visit: www.quest.com/consolidate.

“Capacity Manager from Quest Software is a valuable tool for anyone involved with capacity planning, forecasting and trend analysis,” said Thomas LaRock, database engineering team lead, ING Investment Management. “As a database administrator, I am responsible for over one hundred servers in addition to other daily tasks. Capacity Manager saves time by allowing me to quickly see which servers need my immediate attention.”

Quest’s latest release of Change Director for SQL Server – a solution that allows DBAs to automate the deployment and migration of database schema changes – can now more easily implement enterprise-wide changes by using optional middle-tier architecture. The introduction of a middle tier affords more flexibility and scalability by offloading schema comparisons, impact analyses, script generation and job scheduling to a persistent processing tier. In addition, Change Director offers clustered environment support for both passive/active and active/active clusters and new compare and sync functions that perform comparisons between DDL scripts, previous database snapshots and live databases. This new release allows DBAs to better manage, control, and track schema changes across even the most dynamic of enterprises.

Pricing and Availability

Capacity Manager for SQL Server is available now with North American pricing starting at $995 (USD) per server; more information is available at http://www.quest.com/capacity-manager-for-sql-server. Change Director for SQL Server is available now with North American pricing starting at $995 (USD) per server; more information can be found at www.quest.com/change-director-for-sql-server.

About Quest Software, Inc.

Quest Software, Inc., a leading enterprise systems management vendor, delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases, Windows infrastructure and virtual environments. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 90,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. Quest provides customers with client management as well as server and desktop virtualization solutions through its subsidiaries, ScriptLogic, Vizioncore and Provision Networks. Quest Software helps organizations deliver, manage and control complex database environments through award-winning products for

Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase and MySQL. Quest Software can be found in offices around the globe and at www.quest.com.

Serena Software Launches First Mashup Exchange

tarswar — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:30:03 +0000

Bangalore, April 29^th, 2008 — Serena Software today announced that it has launched Serena® Mashup Exchange™ (http://www.mashupexchange.com), an online marketplace to accelerate the creation and use of Business Mashups. Business users and internal IT departments as well as consulting and channel partners will be able to find, buy, and sell pre-packaged Mashups, Web services, and professional services—without incurring any fees or commissions from Serena.

Serena is providing this online marketplace to change the way businesses confront the “long tail” of IT applications — projects that individually are too small to warrant IT support yet, when taken collectively, represent a market opportunity.

“The Thomas Howe Company, an award winning voice Mashup consultancy, is excited about partnering with Serena in the Mashup Exchange,” said Tom Howe, CEO of The Thomas Howe Company. “We can see that Serena is prepared to provide a winning combination of technology platform, developer support, and go to market strategy. As a result, we are building a very lucrative business using this online marketplace to buy and sell Mashups.”

“The combination of Serena Mashup Exchange and StrikeIron’s Marketplace Web Services makes it easy for any business to access critical business information quickly and on-demand,” said David Linthicum, CEO of StrikeIron. “Now developers, business users, and Serena partners have easier access to live data and a better way to acquire critical business information. Serena has effectively leveraged Data as a Service to drive their marketplace, opening up even more development opportunities for developers and partners in the future.”

MicroExchanges: Multiple Levels of Private and Public Access

Serena Mashup Exchange enables users to create on-demand communities around software offerings or practice areas so they find the Mashups and resources they need. Companies can create private MicroExchanges for secured internal interchange between IT and business units; for example, IT can help business users by publishing Mashup-enabled access to an internal SAP system in a secured, private MicroExchange. Companies can also create open communities for public access for debate, collaboration, and crowd-sourcing. By using HiveLive’s LiveConnect Community Platform, Serena can allow its customers to build virtually any combination of private or public MicroExchange.

The Mashup Exchange gives users an easy way to automate business processes by:

· Bringing together a community of power users who are eager to connect on the Mashup Exchange, and start mashing simple applications themselves.

· Providing “Mashables” or building blocks such as template workflows, Mashup parts, and Web services needed to build their own Mashups.

· Fostering online collaboration between Lines-of-Business and IT, with the best balance of control and self-service.

“Serena Mashup Exchange encourages innovation and collaboration among business users to solve everyday business problems, while also ensuring that IT governance standards are upheld,” said René Bonvanie, SVP, Global Marketing, Partnerships and Online Services, Serena Software.

The launch of the online marketplace represents another milestone in Serena’s plan to reinvent its business around Web 2.0 technologies and user-driven transformations taking place within the enterprise. The company last fall unveiled its free Serena® Mashup Composer™ for the point-and-click creation of Business Mashups to make it easy for business users to visually design simple applications, while freeing up the scarce resources of development. For a monthly subscription fee, these Mashups can be deployed and run on Serena’s on-demand platform, or hosted on premise behind the firewall.

Serena has already created a number of Business Mashups that are available to users for no charge under Creative Commons licenses. Similarly, Serena recommends that small partners give away their Mashups to build notoriety.

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

QUEST SOFTWARE’S DATABASE MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP RECOGNIZED WITH AWARDS FROM KEY INDUSTRY PUBLICATIONS

tarswar — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:45:58 +0000

Bangalore, April 18th, 2008 – Quest Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: QSFT) announced today that it has received editor’s choice awards from two popular IT industry publications. First, IOUG (Independent Oracle Users Group) SELECT Journal honored Steven Feuerstein, Oracle PL/SQL specialist for Quest, with the 2008 SELECT Journal Editor’s Choice Award for his two-part article series, “Six Simples Steps to High Quality Coding.” Second, Service Provider Weekly selected Quest’s Benchmark Factory 4.7.1, a database workload simulation and scalability testing tool, as a winner for the Editor’s Choice Award 2008 for proficiency and performance.

“Quest has been a thought leader in the database management area for several years, thanks to talented & passionate people like Steven Feuerstein. During his visit to India in October 2007, Steven spoke a lot about high quality coding and how India could lead the ‘Quality Revolution’ in coding in the next several years. Quest India is delighted to continue to playing its part in helping our customers move to higher code quality”, says Krishnan Thyagarajan, MD, Quest Software, India. “In addition, Benchmark Factory’s undeniable success as a scalability testing tool gives database administrators and IT managers the confidence that their database will always perform optimally, even under stressful conditions.”

Steven Feuerstein has more than 26 years of experience and has written ten books on PL/SQL, including “Oracle PL/SQL Programming” and “Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices.” After reviewing all of the IOUG SELECT Journal articles from the past year, the publication’s editorial board chose Feuerstein as the one author who demonstrated the most excellence in a technical article.

Benchmark Factory 4.7.1 stress tests environments by simulating users and transactions on the database. In addition, the product has the capabilities to analyze and report on key statistical information in a real-time setting. Service Provider Weekly named Benchmark Factory one of its Editor’s Choice products for 2008, touting the solution’s ability to work with almost any database environment. The publication also highlights the product’s ability to carry out important user load tests without the need to hire specialized personnel, an important benefit for IT departments with limited resources. The entire review can be found at: http://www.spweekly.com/issue1007.pdf.

About Quest Software, Inc.
Quest Software, Inc., a leading enterprise systems management vendor, delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases, Windows infrastructure and virtual environments. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 90,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. Quest provides customers with client management as well as server and desktop virtualization solutions through its subsidiaries, ScriptLogic, Vizioncore and Provision Networks. Quest helps organizations deliver, manage and control complex database environments through award-winning products for Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase and MySQL. Quest Software can be found in offices around the globe and at www.quest.com.

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Quest Software and Quest product names mentioned in this Release are trademarks or registered trademarks of Quest Software, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Other trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

Web Links Referenced in this Release:

Quest Software, Inc: www.quest.com