Pros and Cons of a COTS Solution
Applying a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software solution to your business problems is attractive for many reasons, not the least of which is the short implementation cycle compared with custom-built software. No matter your business problem, chances are good that some software vendor somewhere in the world has a product to help solve it.
However, COTS software is not risk-free, and most businesses have unique problems that no software on the market can solve.
Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of COTS software.
Advantages of COTS Software
As mentioned, COTS software can be implemented much shorter than custom software. This tends to reduce your up-front costs. Calculating your total cost of ownership (TCO) and comparing the costs of different COTS options should also be straightforward.
A product that has been on the market for a while likely has a mature feature set and fewer bugs. And COTS, most software vendors provide regular enhancements, updates, and security patches as part of your subscription.
Support for COTS software tends to be better defined than custom software. Most vendors can provide training and offer some technical support and a service-level agreement (SLA) that guarantees their response and resolution times for issues you report. Many software products also have online community forums run by customers to help with support questions.
Finally, many software vendors offer different deployment options. You can install the system in your on-premise data center or your cloud provider’s environment or use the vendor’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) option. This flexibility lets you control costs further and take advantage of the software even if you don’t have the hardware infrastructure to support it.
Disadvantages of COTS Software
The main disadvantage of COTS software is that you don’t own the source code and have no control over the product’s roadmap. This circumstance can have some unpleasant effects:
- The software may not have all the critical features to address your business problems.
- Even if the vendor invites customers to suggest new features, you might wait years for your suggestions to be implemented, if they are implemented at all.
- If the vendor decides to deprecate an essential feature, you’re pretty much out of luck.
For support, you are almost entirely dependent on the vendor, who can change their support model at any time or drop it altogether. Some vendors offer only email support, with, at best, a 24-hour turnaround time. If you consider the software “mission critical,” this can be a deal-breaker.
For that matter, software vendors can and do go out of business. Unless they can sell their subscriber base to some other vendor, your COTS solution may lose all support and future upgrades—or, for SaaS software, may disappear entirely, along with all your application data.
With its typical annual maintenance or subscription model, COTS software can cost more in the long run than custom software. Some vendors charge you for a block of technical support hours each year. Although this arrangement (in theory) buys you a better response and (perhaps) 24/7 availability, it can cost you hundreds of dollars per support hour.
Finally, you may not realize any competitive advantage because any business, including your competitors, can buy a COTS solution.
Is there a path that provides the benefits of both custom and COTS software? Yes, a hybrid approach.
Next: Pros and Cons of Hybrid Custom/COTS Software
How Solution Machine Can Help
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