The integration will involve federating the repositories of the three products through automated links that project, technology, or process leads can configure graphically. Project leads would decide which items to map over to PPM, such as project time sheets, defect reports, requirements for specific releases, and so on.
Serena acquired Pacific Edge, the company that developed Mariner, last fall just after both companies reengineered their products. Serena had just finished tying requirements into the new version of Dimensions, which controls source code releases and changes.
Meanwhile, Pacific Edge had developed Mariner as a merging of its previous Project Office and Portfolio Edge product lines, which had treated project management and portfolio management separately.
Given that Dimensions 10 is newer than the latest version of TeamTrack, for now less of the installed base will be able to fully take advantage of the automated links to Mariner. By comparison, most TeamTrack users should be able to take advantage of the tie-ins to Mariner with little trouble because a larger part of the installed base is on the current version.
Serena Mariner 6.2, with links to Dimensions 10 and TeamTrack, is available now.
Our View
The key challenge for PPM products is that they not provide an island of management that relies on manual, or custom developed point connections to the tools that manage different parts of the software development lifecycle. So from that standpoint, Serena’s new release is significant.
The announcement comes amidst a race among most, but not all, ALM vendors to add PMM capabilities and better integrate their products. Serena’s claim to fame is that it has tied source code control, change management, and requirements onto a common engine, a feat that MKS, a smaller player, matches (actually, Serena played catch-up there).
Borland has also begun interweaving its products, such as providing bi-directional flows between its Caliber requirements and StarTeam change management products, but it is still in the process of tying its Tempo PPM tooling.
In the meantime, IBM Rational, which invented the ALM product space before it had a name, has only loosely linked its aging ClearCase change management, ClearQuest defect tracking, and RequisitePro requirement management offerings to Rational Portfolio Manager.
Serena has also been involved, along with Compuware, in leading the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF), which at this point has drawn support primarily from niche players rather than household names. Consequently, while Serena can point to its Eclipse role for moral leadership, the net effect is that it will provide a path for third party plug-ins to feed Serena’s PPM dashboards.
