As promised, three-tier application development company Forte Software Inc has entered the workflow market with the release of its production workflow system development application. Forte Conductor, which is based on technology the company originally acquired from Digital Equipment Corp (CI No 3,097), is designed for developing and maintain applications to automate business processes. It marks Forte’s entry into what is already a crowded marketplace, with the likes of FileNet Corp, IBM Corp and Staffware Plc, having most of the market share between them. Conductor, which uses the same language and repository as Forte’s mainstream Application Environment, consists of four modules: Process Design Workshop, for defining the business processes; Process Engine, to track the status of active business processes and route the work across the company; Process History Database, which records the change of status in each workflow, and System Administration Console, which coordinates the workflow process. The Process Engine runs on all major open system server systems and the client components run under Windows, MacOS and the Motif graphical interface. Forte also has a range of application programming interfaces to enable non Forte application components – such as Visual Basic, C++, CORBA applications, Java applets and HTML forms – to integrate with Conductor. Currently out in a beta test version, Conductor is due to ship in the fourth quarter, priced between $2,600 and $4,000 per developer.