Developer of COMPAREX, an industry-standard mainframe product, Troxel founded SERENA Consulting in 1980 and grew it into a publicly traded software company without venture capital.
Raised on a farm near Lake City, Iowa, Douglas Donald Troxel holds a B.S. degree in Mathematics from Iowa State University. Although he majored in Mathematics with a minor in Physics, in 1966 during his senior year, he transferred to the college of Engineering to take a Fortran course and chose Programming (then Data Processing) as a career. His first job was as a Programmer/Analyst at Consumer's Power Company in Jackson, Michigan, where he learned COBOL, Assembler, and the newly emerging IBM product called C.I.C.S.
In 1973, he went to Detroit Edison as a contract programmer, but in 1975, Troxel and his family moved to San Francisco. After working at various contract programming jobs, in 1980 he founded SERENA Consulting; his first contract being at Bank of America where he continued writing a product called COMPAREX for the mainframe world. It quickly became an industry standard and he financed the company's growth without using venture capital.
Then, returning to Bank of America, he began building Change Man with other like-minded software developers whom he hired. In 1997, after serving as CEO, Chairman, and primary developer, Troxel hired a new management team to drive the business, now renamed SERENA Software, Inc. He took the company public on NASDAQ in 1999 as SRNA; however, the congressional reaction to Enron, among others, called the Sarbanes-Oxley laws proved onerous to abide for a small company and he decided to go private.
SERENA had thousands of mainframe customers and over 100K (seat) licenses for Windows and UNIX products. Ninety-eight of the Fortune 100 companies relied on SERENA's products and services. It was and still is the leader in the I.T. Change Governance niche competing against IBM, Computer Associates, and Compuware, continuing to provide I.T. management solutions to enterprises around the world.
In 2001, Troxel retired to Kona, Hawaii. In 2006, Silver Lake Partners assisted in taking SERENA private, leaving him with about 20% of the company stock. He has since served as a Director to the Board and consulted with the developers for product strategy. He has also served as President of the family foundation Change Happens and pursued lifelong interests in physics, astronomy, and politics.
