Commercial Off-the-shelf - Considerations

Considerations

Motivations for using COTS components include hopes for reduction of overall system-development and costs (as components can be bought or licensed instead of being developed from scratch) and reduced long-term maintenance costs. In software development, many regarded COTS as a silver bullet (to reduce cost/time) during the 1990s, but COTS development came with many not-so-obvious tradeoffs—initial cost and development time can definitely be reduced, but often at the expense of an increase in software component-integration work and a dependency on third-party component vendors. In addition, since COTS software specifications are written externally, government agencies sometimes fear incompatibilities may result from future changes.

Besides being a silver bullet, COTS solutions raise some issues. A major issue any COTS solutions is with the stability of the vendor. Vendors can go out of business, can be purchased by other companies or completely drop support for a product. This could be devastating for a customer that has purchased a COTS solution. With a COTS solution you also receive unknown quality. The purchased COTS solution may not perform properly in a customers business environment. Another unknown with COTS is its ability to integrate with other systems. The COTS solution may integrate with a certain system but that integration could be hindered by the external systems current version for example.

Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Software (COTS) is pre-built software usually from a 3rd party vendor. COTS can be purchased, leased or even licensed to the general public. Better, faster and cheaper software applications are what organizations are currently looking for. COTS provides some of the following advantages:

• Applications are provided at a reduced cost.
• The application is more reliable when compared to custom built software because its reliability is proven through the use by other organizations.
• COTS is more maintainable because the systems documentation is provided with the application.
• The application is higher quality because competition improves the product quality.
• COTS is of higher complexity because specialists within the industry have developed the software.
• The marketplace not industry drives the development of the application.
• The delivery schedule is reduced because the basic schedule is operations.