'Our application lifecycle solutions provide control over IT processes'

Serena Software, based out of California, is a 25-year-old company solely
focused on managing change in the IT environment. It provides services more
than 15,000 sites worldwide and its customers include 98 of the Fortune
100. Bill Piwonka, Serena's senior director of Product Marketing and
Management, met up with Bhaswati Chakravorty and spoke on issues like CIO
concerns, the growing significance of compliance in the IT environment, Serena's
solutions to meet the compliance, and its strategy for growth in India.
Excerpts:

What are the biggest challenges in the enterprise today?

The biggest challenge in the enterprise today is change. Today, the IT
environment is far more dynamic than what is was five years back. An increasing
number of companies have global ambitions today, which means they are required
to conform to international regulations and standards. CIOs are increasingly
looking to manage change in both hardware and software effectively. This
typically involves improved business hosting and better management of e-commerce
websites, managing infrastructure downtime better, and predictability control,
among others. There is also an increasing trend towards process automation.

How does Serena help companies manage compliance issues like
Sarbanes-Oxley?

The objective of Sarbanes-Oxley is to govern companies' internal controls
over financial reporting to ensure accuracy. Any change that can affect
financial data must be reported under Sarbanes-Oxley. If a defect in the ERP
system means past financial data was not correct, the company may need to
restate earnings. This means change management must be much more carefully
documented and monitored than in the past.

Bill Piwonka

Our application lifecycle solutions provide control over IT processes to make
them certifiable and auditable. Effective and enforced processes ensure that a
company's mission-critical software applications are not exposed to potential
failure due to oversight, error, and various other risks.

Serena entered the Indian market only about a year back. How do you plan
to capture the market?

We are not solely into traditional software configuration management space,
which is what our competitors, Rational and Borland, primarily focus on. We help
companies manage change throughout the application lifecycle, which helps
companies to efficiently manage the business-critical applications. We believe
it is this differentiator that would tilt the balance in our favor and help us
grow faster in the Indian market.

What is your strategy for growth?

We have recently tied up with Sonata Information Technology (SITL) to market
and sell our application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions in India. SITL is
currently a key distributor in India for industry leaders such as Microsoft,
IBM, Oracle, Mercury Interactive, and BEA. Sonata's expertise in products
support and its broad distribution network gives Serena a powerful springboard
to penetrate the highly complex India market, which is a key strategic growth
initiative for the company.

We have observed that developers prefer to stay with integrated suites and
within the preferred environment. Our solutions are developer centric. We have
recently launched Serena ProcessView Composer in India. The product allows
business processes and application requirements to be visualized, prototyped,
and graphically communicated before the development of an application begins. It
improves communications and collaboration between business and IT stakeholders
across the application lifecycle, saving time and money.

As far as India goes, we have an untapped market here. There is a lot of
dissatisfaction with the market leader. We hope to get 10% of the estimated $42
mn market in India by end 2005. We will operate through direct and indirect
models. We also expect more than 50% of the revenues to come from
partners.