Released just this week by the Cutter Consortium is a paper by Israel Gat, a great customer and friend.  This paper makes the argument for separating the two meanings of "release" in the software world.

Israel first introduced this model back in 2006 on the BMC Performance Manager team.  It worked great!  As a result, I coach most agile teams to start by making sure their "internal release" cadence is twice as fast at marketing, operations and the market is used to.  In this way you get a release where you can gain feedback and steer the "external release" to market better. 

I know from the BMC days, Israel's team ran three internal releases, every 3 months, to marketing external release every 9 to 12 months.  This 3X faster model is even better than the 2X model.  Tell us, do you follow this model?