The set of rules for cots is defined by the federal acquisition regulation far.
Cots commercial off the shelf software applications.
Every business has its unique business needs and not every commercial off the shelf application can fulfill these needs.
Cots applications are becoming increasingly more popular for solving mission and business objectives because the development effort is performed by the vendor of the product instead of a customer s internal staff.
Commercial off the shelf or commercially available off the shelf cots products are packaged solutions which are then adapted to satisfy the needs of the purchasing organization rather than the commissioning of custom made or bespoke solutions a related term mil cots refers to cots products for use by the u s.
Cots is a term used to describe commercial off the shelf software.
Commercial off the shelf software commonly known as cots is the type of computer application that can be purchased at any computer retail store or from a software vendor examples at the smaller end of the spectrum are most anti virus programs games and even computer utilities such as word processors database managers spreadsheet creators and so on.
In the context of the u s.
Software is still developed to improve the efficiency of the organization and both types of software development methods custom application development and off the shelf applications directly serve the purpose.