Q. What drew you to Serena?
A. It’s great to be back in the application development space. The way I see it, the focus for the past four or five years has been infrastructure. Since 2001, 2002, a lot of money has been spent clearing up after the dot-com mess and the mess of client-server. Now I think it is swinging back in the other direction. Companies have spent years doing everything but innovating, and I think folk are looking to IT to innovate again. Application development has come back from the dead.
SOA, web services, and software as a service all play a significant role in application development. I believe that if we can create the sort of company that can stimulate that or help to ease that transition, then there is a great opportunity.
Q. Will you persist with the firm’s marketing strap-line, IT Change Governance? I don’t see other companies using that phrase and I wonder if you are large enough to define a category like that…
A. No. I’m a simple guy. You’re spot on, a company of our size does not have the luxury of being able to create a new category. We’ve got to talk about ALM not IT Change Governance.
Q. And you think ALM is still the right focus?
A. Absolutely. Companies have been worried that the money that they have been spending on application development has not been coming out again. The automation and consolidation around application development has to happen. Companies have 15 different control systems and 10 of those are probably Excel. That’s how the data centre was five or six years ago. The guys at the top said they had had enough of that and brought it back to the centre. In app dev some have got after it but most have not even touched the topic. Consolidation, rationalization, and control have got to come.
Q. What about your product mix, do you think that hits the sweet-spot that you are describing?
A. Yes and no. We’re gearing up to launch a new product code-named Vail, aimed more squarely at the people who are thinking about business processes, not developing Java code. We’ll go live with that toward the end of the year.
Q. Sounds interesting. Can you tell us any more about what Vail will bring to the table?
A. Vail will enable business users to build applications using a set of forms, but also to have the ability to ‘mash that up’ with SAP, or salesforce.com AppExchange, or something else. It will be scripting-based rather than programming-based, be business-process-centric, offer full support for SOA, and offer the ability to deploy the finished application in a hosted fashion.
Q. Do you really think there is a business in composite application development tools these days?
A. The toolset will be offered free, but users will have to pay if and when they opt to deploy the application into production. We don’t think the tool is the business. We will carpet-bomb the world with the tool but what we think people will be prepared to pay for is the run-time environment and management tools.
Q. How does Vail fit alongside the open-source Application Lifecycle Framework project that you guys kicked off, that promises interoperability between around 16 vendors’ development tools?
A. Vail will be fully compliant with ALF. Vail will enable you to mash up ALF processes, supporting any other ALF-compliant toolset. We want it to be able to play in whatever environment customers already have. We think Vail will be one of the first ALF consumers, if not the first.
Q. Since Serena was taken private, there have been numerous acquisitions. Are M&As likely to continue? And is an IPO likely?
A. We will continue to look out for technologies in the ALM space. I would love to take it public again. You have got to be growing and to grow you have got to be relevant to the future. There is certainly work to do: if there were no problems then we would not have gone private in the first place. But I think the technology is in good shape, and everything else is fixable. We are incredibly profitable for our size, but we need better execution and to place the company in a way that is relevant to what transpires.
We have done OK positioning Serena for the present and past but maybe not the future. We need to work on our product strategy to keep us relevant not just today but for the next few years and beyond. And if you don’t factor the internet into your thinking then you are just not credible.
