I have written about Serena on a number of occasions, the most recent was “Serena Moves into SaaS, Project Management, and Agile Application Development.” Recently, I spoke with Nathan Rawlin, their Senior Director of Product Marketing, and Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications to catch up their latest moves. Serena continues to upgrade its mashup offerings and has added two major enhancements since my last conversation.

First, The Serena Mashup Composer, a visual design tool to build and test mashups without coding, now allows you to incorporate widgets, which have primarily been used in the consumer world. Now users simply drag and drop widgets, RSS feeds, Flash components and more into their business mashups. This means that people can now pull in information from any widget on the Internet – details from a Facebook profile, a photo from Google Images or the local weather forecast from Yahoo! Weather — into a mashup. This traditionally consumer information can enhance enterprise applications.

Nathan gave me an example. Suppose a sales rep is preparing for a big meeting with a new customer. The rep might start with the customer’s record in salesforce.com, and have the mashup fetch related information like a photo and details from the customer’s LinkedIn or Facebook profile, external news feeds showing the company’s latest stock price, credit report information from a Dun & Bradstreet Web service, and widgets showing local weather and traffic in the customer’s location. Soon, the rep has all the information needed for the meeting. This mashup can be reused as a template for other meetings, saving the time and effort of rebuilding the mashup, visiting multiple data sources again and again for the same information.

This makes a lot of sense to me. The Mashup Composer remains, free. The charges start after you have built and tested the mashup and need to have it hosted.

Serena has also launched a new Business Mashup designed specifically for the application release process. It provides an automated way for application developers, IT operations, and business users to communicate and collaborate with each other during the release process. Serena’s Application Release Manager combines Web 2.0-based workflow capabilities with ChangeMan® ZMF, a Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) application for the mainframe, to manage the application release process, from initial change requests through final deployment into the production environment. Nathan said this is the first browser-based app to mainframe mashup he knows about. This is a positive development, as the mainframe is certainly not going away but the people who can work with it are declining. Enterprise 2.0 will need to get along with it.

There are many large companies that still generate an extensive number of mainframe applications. One of their clients created 484,000 new mainframe apps in the past year. The number of IT people who can sit and stare at mainframe green screens is getting smaller. Now users can monitor and communicate through a browser-based system that is more familiar to the current generation of IT people. As with any Serena Business Mashup, the Application Release Manager includes a visual process designer with out-of-the-box process templates that can be customized to suit individual needs. As a result, all of the project stakeholders can coordinate their activities, including application developers, IT operations teams, and even business users who traditionally had no visibility into mainframe applications. The templates include the following: Issue Tracking, Request to Test, Agile Backlog, Change requests, Hardware and Software Changes, and Demand Management.

These two developments represent nice bridges in opposite directions, to the consumer web world and to the mainframe world. In each case, Serena is going to these worlds for the right business reasons. I look forward to hearing about further developments such as their announced future moves into Agile application development.

One of the Serena announcements mentioned that Forrester projects the enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013 (see Forrester’s May 2008 report called “The Mashup Opportunity”). If anything, I think this underestimates the total volume as mashups are becoming a major application development mode that underlies much of SOA application development. Perhaps, they are only thinking of the market for specific mashup tools, as the divide in enterprise tools is getting grayer. At any rate, mashups are a big deal.