COMMERCIAL OF THE SHELF PRODUCTS (COTS)

The term is used in Defense procurement Specifications for commercial systems that can be modified to military standards with simple modifications.

COTS can be applied equally to hardware, software, or even a complete system. It is not a description of the value or provenance or ruggedness of a piece of equipment; it is a methodology for procurement of the most appropriate items to perform the required function in a system. COTS procurement is about making effective use of components, assemblies, software, subsystems, and systems that are commercially available, which might, if correctly selected, facilitate the construction of an end-use system application.

COTS-based systems has been around as a practical means of implementing embedded systems for at least 15 years now. In the embedded real-time computing segment of our marketplace the genesis of COTS could be seen in the first offerings of non-developmental items (NDI) in the form of rugged off-the-shelf Multibus and VMEbus cards from a number of vendors. However, the COTS movement really took off in 1995 with the great changes of the Perry era and turned into today's success story by continuous innovation and evolutionary change as vendors reacted to issues such as component obsolescence, lifecycle management, and technology insertion.

The use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products as elements of larger systems is becoming increasingly commonplace. Shrinking budgets, accelerating rates of COTS enhancement, and expanding system requirements are all driving this process.

The shift from custom development to COTS-based systems is occurring in both new development and maintenance activities. If done properly, this shift can help establish a sustainable modernization practice.

The design, development, and maintenance of COTS-based systems are complex. New products and technologies constantly emerge into the marketplace. The vendors of existing products work to differentiate their product from those of competitors. This leads to a marketplace characterized by a vast array of products and product claims, extreme quality and capability differences between products, and many product incompatibilities, even when they purport to adhere to the same standards.

For organizations designing and implementing a COTS-based system, or upgrading a legacy system with COTS components, the current market state presents a number of challenges. It is difficult to discover the actual technical capabilities of a product or set of competing products, since there is no objective forum for product evaluation. Once individual products are selected, it is difficult to identify and resolve mismatches between products, and to avoid becoming captive to the products of a single vendor or set of vendors ("vendor lock"). Equally difficult but necessary is the ability to forecast what technologies and products will be relevant over the life of the system.

Thus, in designing and constructing a COTS-based system, or in modifying a legacy system to take advantage of COTS products, an organization must answer a number of questions, including:

Which technologies and products are most appropriate?
How can product mismatches be rectified in our system?
How can we engineer system attributes such as reliability, security, and performance in spite of decreasing control over individual system components?
How do we integrate COTS products with the custom code that continues to provide the core of many systems?
How do we take advantage of COTS while delivering a system that can evolve over a long lifetime?
Strategy
To address the many questions and issues regarding the application of a CBS strategy, the SEI CBS Initiative is focusing on three key areas:

Product and Technology Evaluation Practices
Acquisition and Management Practices
Design and Software Engineering Practices

TYou must to consider both immediate requirements and long range needs in order to identify qualified components. Candidate products and technologies are studied in the context of related products and technologies. Hands-on experiments are designed within the relevant problem domain in order to answer critical questions and to assist in developing guidelines for the use of COTS products and technologies.

Ruggedization

Different environments require different ruggedization solutions. Military systems must to specific requirements that allow the product to operate within the harshest environmental conditions, sustain extreme temperature changes vibration and shocks, with radiation tolerance. There are some Industries in the world specific oriented to rugedize and "militarize" commercial products.

There are many selection criteria that must be evaluated for COTS to be effective: functional, performance, environmental, time to deployment, mechanical, reliability, maintainability, lifecycle, repair and maintenance philosophy, initial cost, system engineering cost, through-life cost, budget cycles, and the selection of the right vendor for the job; ignore any one of these and the program will be at risk and COTS will be considered to have been the culprit.