COTS acquisition process: incorporating business factors in COTS vendor evaluation taxonomy

The increasingly prevalent use of COTS components has attracted a huge capital pool to the industry. The result is an industry that is characterized by strong change forces and weak resistance. Under such environment, weaker players are constantly replaced by stronger players, and older technologies are constantly replaced by emerging technologies. This phenomenon has brought about a new class of risk to the COTS acquirers. These risk factors include the vendor's financial stability and technology capability. However, the existing COTS vendor evaluation taxonomies remain product centric, focusing only on product functionality and costs. We extend the taxonomies to incorporate business factors in the vendor evaluation process, and the resulting process is called VERPRO. The VERPRO decision making tool, which is based on the analytic hierarchy process, allows the acquirers to incorporate vendor business factors into the selection criteria.