W4 BUSINESS FIRST is certified by TEC

W4, a leading European software company for customized business applications and BPM specialist, has launched a new version of its offer BUSINESS FIRST incorporating several new features and extending functional capabilites for both processes and data to facilitate business application composition.

For this occasion, Canadian analyst firm Technology Evaluation Center (TEC) deems BUSINESS FIRST as a competitive and pure BPM software suite. The TEC core analysis focused mainly on the expected high standard functions of BPM software suites, but did not include the many benefits associated with Model Driven application development, another important factor for BUSINESS FIRST that was added and further highlighted by the TEC cabinet report: "Based on three basic elements - the process model, application data, and user interfaces (...) BUSINESS FIRST offers an approach to developing models based on engineering (MDE) to allow users to focus on the model and not the code (...). BUSINESS FIRST also uses an agile development approach to allow users to create and maintain processes at an accelerated pace and focus on incremental improvements."

Much effort has been put into this new version for providing increased interoperability of applications with different blocks of the information system, Web Services connectors in the process, and a pick-up feature allows triggering workflow tasks. Integration with application servers is easier and servers can now also use PostgreSQL databases. Furthermore, the application itself can be automatically exposed as web services.

The composition of applications is facilitated with tools for exploring or recovering data, either simple flat files Excel (CSV) or through incremental introspection of relational databases, enhancing the interaction between business processes and data. This can be triggered directly from business data into the application. The application life cycle is a key element of BUSINESS FIRST and this backward compatibility has been improved to streamline the transition from one iteration to the next.

Above all, the ease of handling is essential: a new procedure for automatic installation called Easy install is available. In addition, the deployment of an application BUSINESS FIRST is now possible, with one click, in hosted mode on the private W4 cloud. This feature takes advantage of virtualization technology and infrastructure components available via the cloud platform in order to quickly deploy and test your business application online.

In conclusion, as the analyst TEC has well noted in its report, it is confirmed that BUSINESS FIRST offers users an entire software suite of agile tools for composing collaborative applications that integrate powerful BPM features. "W4 was able to demonstrate a powerful application with BPM BUSINESS FIRST. The BPM solution is a serious competitor with exciting features and functions that allow users to create, execute and maintain business processes in a timely manner."