As our engineering organization matures in its agile development processes, we have asked ourselves whether there is a reason for delaying the release of features for our customers. At the same time, we are very aware that we have a many of customers using on-premises version of FlexNet Manager Suite.
During the past couple of years, we have increased the frequency of our product releases, from 1-2 times a year to 3-4 times a year.
We know that customers using our cloud environment do not have to do any maintenance work. We do that for those customers. But the opposite is true for on-premises implementations. How do we balance the ease of delivery to FlexNet Manager Suite cloud customers with reasonable and consumable frequency of updates for on premises customers?
Keeping the various questions in mind, we have decided to split the delivery of releases for each of these customer bases.
Starting April 2019, we will be updating our FlexNet Manager Suite cloud environment on a monthly basis. If you are using our cloud environment, you will see smaller and more frequent updates. We will continue to push the changes to the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment a few days before updating production environments to give you an opportunity to familiarize and test the changes. You also will see new version numbering – the April update will be 2019 R1.1, followed by 2019 R1.2 in May, and so on.
For our on-premises customers, we will move to two releases per year. Based on our discussions with customers, we want to provide predictable release time frames and avoid common “black out” periods, so that new versions can be implemented when they are released. As a result, we are targeting the first and third quarters of each year for these releases. Since we just released FlexNet Manager Suite 2019 R1 at the end of Q1 2019, the next release is targeted for Q3 2019. The exact timing will be determined closer to release date in order to make sure we can maximize the benefit of each release. For example, if we don’t believe we can deliver complete features after August, we will create the release in August. But if we feel we can provide additional value by waiting until September, we will wait until late September to produce the next on premises release.
If you would like to provide feedback on our plans, feel free to reach out to me at dgalecki@flexera.com, or your account or customer success representative.
