According to Rene Bonvanie, senior vice president of marketing and online services, and a Salesforce.com alum, the goal of Vail is to reach the Excel macro developer who hasn’t the time nor inclination to bother IT for what are otherwise relatively modest sized projects. Serena becomes the latest company to target so-called enterprise mashups, which means quick and easy assembling of composite applications without need for hard core Java or C# skills.
The new product, which is offered with a software-as-a-service model, is designed to get around a couple obvious obstacles: your typical Excel macro developer doesn’t want to contend with installing software, or bothering IT to do it, and obviously doesn’t want to mess around with procuring the hardware.
It’s centered around a mashup composer that Serena describes as a Microsoft Office companion because, frankly, it was designed to look like Microsoft Office. It works standalone or will integrate with Office 2007. You build the process flow, design the forms, and when you’re done, you deploy them to the cloud (the hosted service) where the tool itself resides.
The idea, according to Burton, is to take mashups beyond the all-too-familiar mashups that add displays atop Google Maps.
However, while Vail is intended to reduce business power user reliance on IT, you can’t fully get away from them. Because Vail builds mashups through web services that are exposed form existing enterprise systems, it requires that IT build those services so you can work with them. In other words, let IT build them and only you need to come.
And Vail is designed to provide a best of both worlds, where business users can feel relatively free to roam around and toy with web services that are already exposed, but with IT keeping a watchful eye. The link is through a web service that can be discovered by Mariner, Serena’s project portfolio management (PPM) tool, and with TeamTrack, which erforms defect tracking.
You build your mashup through a graphical workflow builder that looks like some of the whiteboarding tools used by some BPM (business process management) tools. The workflow builder is used for building the logic of the process that you want to assemble and a description of how the integration points, or web services, are supposed to chain together. Vail originated from a skunk works project that then-incoming president Burton discovered, which applied TeamTrack issue tracking in a lightweight manner so as to help software development teams reduce their backlogs.
Instead, Burton saw a simplified tool that could make software development doable outside the software organization, so he redirected the product group accordingly. Having developed the Oracle Technology Network along with then and current colleague Bonvanie, both wanted to apply the idea of giving away the tool and charging subscriptions per seat for usage. That’s a model that Bonvanie got used to while running Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.
Vail is literally being officially released this week at Serena’s user conference.
Our View
We saw Vail, and believe that indeed, it’s easy enough that even we could use it. But it’s hardly the only tool out there that is beginning to make composite application development, or if you prefer the term, mashups, accessible to the rest of us. And it’s not the only player trying to make mashups enterprise-ready.
For instance, rivals like Nexaweb are offering more enterprise-ready frameworks to enable mashups to work in high demand environments like trading systems; JackBe has positioned itself as the enterprise data mashup company; BEA is now providing collaborative products that use social computing techniques to make enterprise mashups more accessible; while IBM has introduced enterprise wiki mashups showing you can drag and drop objects on the screen and develop tactical apps fast.
Serena’s claim is that it is making enterprise mashups doable for the rest of us, while still keeping it part of the managed software delivery lifecycle. As an ALM vendor that built its name on change management, it’s a logical differentiator.
The question at this point is whether Serena will use Vail as the first step in changing its core business model to a Salesforce model. Recruiting Bonvanie from Salesforce is a tempting hint.
As an ALM vendor, Serena would hardly be the first, as open source, agile tool providers like Rally and CollabNet are already offering various pieces of software development project planning through the SaaS model. In all likelihood, Serena will adapt other pieces of its business to that model, but it won’t be a wholesale transformation.
