7 Rules when choosing a commercial off-the-shelf software product(COTS)

Today almost every business of every size will be using a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product in one of their business processes. But COTS products are not necessarily appropriate for every system.

In this blog, we provide some information to help guide decisions about when commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products are an appropriate solution—and when they are not. When purchasing a COTS-based system purchasers have high expectation in terms of value and the effort required to successfully deliver that value. This makes it difficult to make the necessary decisions.

Rule 1: Find the ways in which

COTS products can help you.

Rule 2: Determine the regulatory,

statutory, and policy constraints

on your system to decide

whether they make the use of

COTS products are infeasible.

Rule 3: Establish whether your

the system is subject to extreme

performance requirements (e.g.,

security, safety, real-time) and

whether they exceed the

capabilities of the COTS

products.

Rule 4: Decide whether the

requirements and users’

business processes are flexible

enough to accommodate COTS

products.

Rule 5: Determine your ability to

leverage the marketplace.

Rule 6: If you are developing

your COTS-based system by

evolving an existing architecture,

examine that architecture for its

resiliency and its ability to keep

on evolving.

Rule 7: Generate a gross

cost/benefit analysis.