New PVCS Professional

It is with pleasure that I can announce that PVCS Pro 11, including VM 9, will be released before the end of this quarter!
To get the field, as well as our customers ready for this new release, launch activities are starting today. We will be gradually and regularly be updating you and the PVCS community till the product is GA. Many of you will have questions around the product and strategy around this, so lets start in this email with addressing the most common ones.

Why are we doing this?

We have been surveying our PVCS customer base and found that close to 50% of our PVCS customers are interested in agile, but have no tool support for it. Another interesting observation was that most organizations seem to rely on word and excel for capturing their requirements, less than 15% reported to be using a requirements management tool.

To keep our happy customers happy, to send out a clear message to our client community and those in doubt that PVCS is not a dead product, and to demonstrate that we are still delivering value for the maintenance our customer pay, we are coming out with PVCS Pro 11 and VM 9, taking all the input we gathered from the community into consideration.

Which components will be in the new PVCS Pro suite?

The professional suite will include the following elements (note that there are a significant number of new items being added): Serena Agile Planner (NEW), Prototype Composer(NEW),  Issue and Defect Tracking (powered by SBM), VM 9, Agile Connector for SBM(NEW), Prototype Composer Connector for SBM (NEW),  and the Serena License Manager.

What is the value for the PVCS Professional customer?

As you can see from the component list, the biggest changes we are introducing are the addition of Serena Agile and Prototype Composer to the suite.  These additions provide (agile) project planning and lightweight requirements capturing and prototyping capabilities.

We will provide out-of-the-box integrations between Agile, the SBM powered Issue and Defect Tracking solution, and VM. This integrated solution will allow the capturing and tracking of issues and defects, the ability to plan those into (agile) releases and sprints and manage them, with the ability to check-in code against any issue, defect or task directly from within VM or RIDE clients.

Prototype Composer will integrate with SBM to provide a lightweight requirements management solution that can be used to visualize and help elicit and document requirements, supporting the growing need of better understanding and flexible collaboration around requirements.

We recognize that some parts of the organization could be using SVN for version management. As a result, we are adding the SVN connector for SBM so that all parts of the organization will be able use the requirements and process management capabilities of the suite to remain in control, and get the right level of visibility and auditability across all their teams, whether they use VM or SVN. As such we are providing maximum flexibility.

All the above will be available for free for all PVCS Pro customers under maintenance…

What is the value for the VM-only customer?

Many PVCS customer have been concerned about the future of their product. The release of VM 9 and the Pro 11 suite will be a first step to demonstrate they remain safe with Serena. VM 9 will include it will contain new performance improvements for the Eclipse and .NET clients, and we will add CAC and SSO support.

In addition we recognize that the tightly integrated solution offered in the new Pro suite could be very attractive to existing VM customers as well. We will therefore create a promotion to existing VM-only customers allowing them to upgrade to the PVCS Pro 11 suite for 50% off the difference between VM and Pro list prices.

What about Mover?

Initially it was mentioned that Mover would be part of the solution bundle. However, Mover will not be included in the PVCS Pro 11 suite, but the product will still available for sale for those geographies that need a bundled solution that addresses deployment.  Also the integration with VM will continue to be supported.

Many of you will probably have more questions than the above, and would like to get more details, but as mentioned before, this email is just the beginning, stay tuned, more to come in the coming weeks,