Survey Findings Reveal 2012’s Top App Dev Priorities and Initiatives

Dec. 14, 2011 - PRLog -- St Albans, UK – December 14, 2011 – Serena Software, the leader in orchestrated application delivery, IT and business processes, today announced the results of a new revealing survey on application development and delivery priorities and initiatives for 2012. The survey, conducted by Serena at Gartner’s recent Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit showed 68 percent of respondents view delivering applications faster to the business as the top priority in application development for the New Year. Expanding the use of Agile and reducing application development costs were the second and third highest priorities, coming respectively in at 52 percent and 49 percent.

The survey also covered top Application Development initiatives for 2012. According to those surveyed, managing applications as a business process came in as the most important initiative for next year. Survey respondents – many senior level IT executives from financial services, public sector, IT services and healthcare organisations – also reported that demonstrating end-to-end traceability across different tools and the application development lifecycle was a growing need among organisations and came in as the number two priority in application development, up three spots in importance from a similar survey taken at last year’s Gartner AADI Summit.

Delivering applications faster is not only the top priority among those surveyed, it is also growing in importance, up almost ten percent from the 2010 survey. Interestingly enough, performance has outpaced cost as a priority, according to the survey, as the reduction of application development costs dropped in importance in this year’s survey—replaced as the number two priority with agile use.

Other survey results revealed:
•   85 percent of respondents cited managing application development as a business process as “very important to extremely important” to their organisation;
•   65 percent said having end-to-end traceability (from code in production back to the business requirements) is “very important to extremely important”;
•   84 percent said integrating the different tools used in the application development process is a “very important to extremely important” initiative for 2012;
•   Almost half of respondents (47 percent) reported increased innovation as a top application development priority in 2012;
•   The same amount (47 percent) revealed standardisation on methodology as another top application development priority.

While most software delivery teams today have the right tools, roles and functions in place, Serena sees the biggest challenge lying in finding a way for these elements to effectively work together from initial request to release into production, so the entire IT organisation can be as efficient and cost effective as possible. By putting effective processes in place, even the largest global enterprises can better orchestrate, measure, predict and also improve the overall software delivery process.

Supporting Quote
“Our survey results prove that our forward-thinking orchestrated application lifecycle management strategy is fully aligned with customer needs and priorities for 2012,” said David Hurwitz, Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing at Serena Software. “Most IT organisations today leverage multiple development tools and we don’t believe this is going to change. Our approach supports this reality by providing solutions that allow teams to deliver applications faster while leveraging their existing assets in a cost-effective and completely auditable manner.”

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About Serena Software
Serena Software provides solutions that orchestrate application delivery, IT operations and business processes for the Global 2000. Serena’s mission is to help enterprises orchestrate their world.  Its 3,000 active enterprise customers, encompassing almost one million users worldwide, have made Serena the largest independent ALM vendor, and are now using Serena to orchestrate IT service management and many other processes.  Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Serena serves enterprise customers from 29 offices in 14 countries. Serena is a portfolio company of Silver Lake Partners, the leader in private investments in technology-enabled industries. For more information on Serena, visit http://www.serena.com.

Media Contacts:        
Cathy Wright (for U.S. inquiries)        
Kulesa Faul for Serena Software        
Cathy@kulesafaul.com

Mark Kember (for UK inquiries)
Goode Communications for Serena Software
+44 (0) 1491 873323
mark.kember@goode.co.uk