The Pricing Strategy Analysis for the “Software-as-a-Service” Business Model

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software products are being included in ever more complex and critical systems. There are clearly advantages to considering the use of COTS in such systems, but given the rigorous needs of such critical systems or subsystems, there are concerns about the suitability of COTS software for such applications. The AIAA’s Software Systems Technical Committee and the AIAA’s Computer Systems Technical Committee have undertaken an effort to produce a guidebook that captures issues related to the consideration and use of COTS products in these large, complex systems, with a special emphasis on those risks and risk mitigation approaches that relate to mission critical systems. This guidebook identifies a set of characteristics of mission critical systems that makes the consideration, selection and validation processes of COTS products (hardware, software, subsystems, etc.) an emerging factor in systems definition, development and acceptance. The guidebook discusses a large number of risk areas related to using COTS software products in mission critical systems and identifies various mitigation approaches to the risks. It includes detailed processes for selecting and evaluating the products and considerations for using COTS software products within the overall context of the software development life cycle standardized in IEEE/EIA 12207. Mission critical system characteristics such as reliability, safety, availability, maintainability and certification tend to influence whether or not COTS software should be considered for a given application. Once the suitability of COTS software has been determined, then it is possible that additional requirements may be placed on the product and/or the product’s vendor for such mission critical applications. Further, it is possible that certain system requirements and expectations may need to be modified because of the inclusion of COTS software products in that system. As COTS products continue to be considered as candidates for inclusion within mission critical systems, there are likely to be additional concerns and factors to emerge that will influence how both acquirers and suppliers decide if and/or when to use COTS products. Ongoing monitoring of this technology area seems to be warranted.

The use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software has become more and more important in state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice software and system development. The use of COTS software promises faster time-to-market, reduced development costs, increased productivity, and the possibility for companies to focus on their own core competencies. At the same time, COTS software increases risks, such as the economic instability of the COTS software vendor, unknown quality properties of the COTS software in use, and side-effects of the COTS software on the final product. Typically, COTS-based development, in parallel with the traditional development cycle (e.g. waterfall, spiral), consists of four phases. The first phase (COTS assessment and selection) is the most crucial phase in the COTS-based cycle, since long-term decisions about which COTS software to use in a software system are made there. A late recognition that the wrong COTS software was used can become extremely costly for a software organization. This paper presents a repeatable, cost-efficient and systematic method for performing measurement-based COTS assessment and selection. Moreover, cost/benefit analysis results of two industrial pilot projects, in which the method was successfully applied, are presented.

Over the last decade the United States Government has significantly increased its use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software as stand-alone solutions and as components in safety-critical systems. This increased use stems from the realization that pre-existing software products can be a means of lowering development costs, shortening development time, and keeping pace with the changing software market. The Federal government, particularly with regards to safety-critical systems, has found that COTS software is currently not plug-and-play, has significant tradeoffs, and usually contains a cradle-to-grave dependence on the software manufacturer. Unfortunately, there is currently no standard best commercial practice with regard to the acceptance of COTS software. Ad hoc attempts to apply standards for commercial software acceptance have been based upon subjective criteria and have proven to be imprecise and prone to error. Moreover, acceptability in safety-critical systems generally demands analysis of source code. Many software vendors, however, have chosen to keep all such source code proprietary due to liability and intellectual property concerns. When the source code is not available, there is very little that can be done to ensure the safety, reliability, and integrity of the software. This paper discusses the COTS Score, an approach that aids in determining the acceptability of COTS software. The process involves the application of predictive techniques used for financial credit scoring to the COTS domain. The methodology addresses the issue of acceptability by incorporating both functional and environmental software measures related to reliability, compatibility, certifiability, obsolescence, and life cycle including trade-off analyses. This approach satisfies NASA and ISO 9001 requirements to define an acceptance procedure for COTS software.

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software has become a crucial component of many of today’s mission- and safety-critical products. As these products have proliferated internationally, global demand for software safety and performance quality has increased. Unfortunately, the current state-of-the-art in software assessment technology has not matured to the point where well-established and widely accepted schemes for evaluating COTS software quality have been presented. Without insight into the source code, COTS software users depend on a subjective assessment of attributes described by performance metrics, behavioral descriptions, and/or historical product data. Published techniques that attempt to formalize the above approach are often less than successful due to ill-defined and subjective metrics, and the naive assumption of independence between attributes. Recently, software standards have been seen as a means of improving the evaluation process by providing an acknowledged criterion for software metric comparison. Given the stated issues, is it possible to develop a standards-based dependency model of well-defined attributes that does not depend on naive assumptions? The answer to this question is yes. This paper describes a process that can be used to extract acyclic dependency models, if they exist, from various software product quality standards. Application of the extraction process will be used to reveal the attribute dependency model of the international software standard ISO/IEC 9126-1. Not only can this process be used for COTS software evaluation, but it can also be used by standards making bodies to clarify the reasoning, justifications and causal implications they employ when developing standards.

This paper presents development of a testbed to support collaboration among a set of distributed engineers to reverse, re-engineer, and fast manufacture (RRF) components for aging aircrafts. This testbed allows a geographically distributed team to work on a design task both synchronously and asynchronously. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software tools and equipment that support the RRF process have been identified, evaluated, and tested. An integration framework has also been developed and employed to create an RRF testbed. This testbed constructed using COTS software and equipment supports three major engineering tasks: the reverse engineering that supports recovering of technical data from worn sample parts, re-engineering that alters design for better performance or lower cost, and fast prototyping that incorporates advanced manufacturing technologies to produce functional or physical prototype of the part in small quantity in a short turnaround time. Traditional reverse engineering projects are ad-hoc, usually takes relatively long time to generate solid models from physical parts. The developed testbed utilizes commercial software to accomplish reverse engineering, re-engineer and fast manufacture using a systematic approach. A number of examples obtained from logistics centers have been employed to illustrate and demonstrate the capabilities established in the RRF testbed.

This paper provides an overview of network architecture, network building block, and network application issues involved in the insertion of Fibre Channel (FC) Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology into avionics systems. At the network architecture level, FC supports a simple and low cost Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) topology which is extensible to fabric switch architectures. A COTS FC testbed is described which has been constructed to characterize FC-AL performance for defined domain-specific avionics scenarios. The testbed is also being used to prototype an avionics multimedia network via integration of FC COTS network controllers and software with streaming video encoders and decoders. Based on lessons learned from the testbed activity and other FC system architecture insertion studies, a set of FC based domain extended products suitable for insertion into avionics systems is identified. Finally future activities required to continue toward a fully capable FC Avionics Multimedia Network (AMN) are described.

Technology insertion into an existing system or subsystem requires careful planning and evaluation. Because the technology is new, there is often limited information upon which to base decisions. Further, decisions about technology insertion are typically made in the very early stages of a project when detailed information is sparse. Under these circumstances, the available information is typically linguistic, and fuzzy methods can be used to significant advantage in this environment. The implementation discussed in this paper employs an Excel spread sheet for user interface, and it employs COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf Technology) software for an inference engine. Heuristic based models are developed to evaluate risk in technology insertion. Risk elements include: budget risk, schedule risk, and performance risk. Results with an example problem are described to illustrate the fuzzy logic method, and conclusions are drawn regarding the advantages of this technique.

Software robustness problems may hinder the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software modules and legacy software modules in mission-critical and safety-critical applications. This research focuses on hardening COTS and legacy software modules against robustness failures triggered by exceptional inputs. An automated approach is presented that is capable of identifying the triggers of the robustness failures. A fault model-the dimensionality model-is used to guide analysis. An experiment is described which demonstrates the feasibility of automating the process of analyzing failure causes and hardening against certain data types in POSIX function calls, for example, NULL pointer values and scalar data types such as INT and FLOAT. The final goal of this research is to provide users a tool to harden COTS and legacy software modules automatically.

Various reference models have been presented for purchasing software products and information processing systems. Moreover, such capability maturity models as SA-CMM, SPICE and BOOTSTRAP can be used to assess the maturity of software acquisition. However, these models do not specifically aim at supporting the acquisition of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software components. They are more intended for end-users to help making investments in software packages. Yet, the models can be used as a starting point to define a COTS software component acquisition (CSCA) process framework. This paper discusses experiences from an industriacase study, where requirements for a CSCA process were gathered, and a process framework developed for a telecommunication company based on the requirements. The existing reference and capability models for software acquisition were used to launch the work but the process framework was defined based mostly on the particular needs of the company, taking the key characteristics of COTS software components into account.

Mission-critical system designers may have to use a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) approach to reduce costs and shorten development time, even though COTS software components may not specifically be designed for robust operation. Automated testing can assess component robustness without sacrificing the advantages of a COTS approach. This paper describes the Ballista methodology for scalable, portable, automated robustness testing of component interfaces. An object-oriented approach based on parameter data types rather than component functionality essentially eliminates the need for function-specific test scaffolding. A full-scale implementation that automatically tests the robustness of 233 operating system software components has been ported to ten POSIX systems. Between 42% and 63% of components tested had robustness problems, with a normalized failure rate ranging from 10% to 23% of tests conducted. Robustness testing could be used by developers to measure and improve robustness, or by consumers to compare the robustness of competing COTS component libraries.

The development of a PC-based functional test platform that incorporates Statistical Process Control (SPC) and a failure analysis database is described. With Commercial Off-The-Shelf(COTS) tools available it is possible in a low volume high-mix environment to easily obtain basic statistical information on each test, develop an easily accessible database of information on failures, causes of failures and troubleshooting activities and increase test efficiency with minimal test development costs. A common test platform has been developed that can be configured to test a wide variety of sub-assemblies from digital controller cards to radio frequency (RF) modules. The platform consists of a PC with a multi-function data acquisition card and a General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) card for control of test instruments. Applications are linked with Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) and the PCs are connected to the company's Local Area Network (LAN) so that test data can be accessed from throughout the plant. A key point is the implementation of SPC with this test platform. Statistics include process capability indices C/sub p/ and C/sub pk/ and failure rate. Test data is analyzed and used to make process improvements. Examples are presented. Since the entire system has been designed and built around established COTS software and hardware, additional capabilities can be easily added in the future. Some planned enhancements are described.

The use of Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) as a tool in assessing acquisition and development program risk has steadily increased over the past several years. There is considerable evidence to support the utility of using TRLs as part of a risk assessment, but there are some difficulties in using TRLs with software, especially Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software technology and products. These difficulties take several forms, including “blurring-together” various aspects of COTS technology/product readiness; the absence of some important aspects of readiness; COTS product “decay;” and no mechanism to account for changes in the relative importance of the contributors to technology/product readiness over time. This paper briefly examines these issues, and proposes an alternate methodology—ImpACT—for assessing COTS software technology and product readiness which considers these factors.KeywordsAnalytic Hierarchy ProcessSoftware TechnologyTechnology MaturityTechnology ReadinessProduct ReadinessThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The use of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf software) is not the panacea sometimes implied by procurers. Indeed, for safety-critical systems (SCS), it may increase costs rather than decrease them. This may be true even in the production phase of system procurement, and the risks of the support phase may outweigh any benefits gained in initial purchase costs. However, the use of COTS in SCS should neither be accepted nor rejected out of hand. Instead any proposed use of COTS in an SCS project should involve at least: (a) a cost and risk analysis, to show that there are likely to be economic benefits, and that the identified risks can be mitigated and are tolerable; and (b) the early production of a draft safety case, to be bought off with the procurement or certification agency, showing that there is an acceptable approach to certifying the COTS-as well as other software. These actions will not guarantee an economical or risk-free project, but they should counterbalance the frequently encountered and naive view that the use of COTS is necessarily cheaper-even in SCS.

This study was conducted to primarily define what domain in the corporate social responsibility significantly influenced firm competitiveness. The respondents of this study were the employees from various divisions and departments of APEX mining company situated at Maco, Davao de Oro, Philippines. This study utilized a quantitative non-experimental research method employing the causal-effect technique. Further, it used two sets of adapted questionnaires in gathering the data to find out the level of Corporate Social Responsibility towards firm competitiveness of APEX mining corporation. The results showed that Corporate Social Responsibility is very much evident with regard to economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities. Firm competitiveness was very much evident in terms of quality, innovation, delivery channels, and customer relationship. Moreover, there existed a significant link in Corporate Social Responsibility towards firm competitiveness of APEX mining corporation in Davao de Oro. All the domains of Corporate Social Responsibility such as economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities predicted firm competitiveness of APEX mining corporation in Davao de Oro. This implied that Corporate Social Responsibility helped APEX mining corporation in Davao de Oro built a progressive image with suppliers, bankers, customers, and investors. Thus, strongly gave impact to its feat in the competitive setting. KEYWORDS: Corporate social responsibility, competitive advantage, firm competitiveness.

This paper will discuss the design and development of a visual inspection system and its integration into a proprietary Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) software environment. The initial concept of our inspection system is discussed, including a brief outline of why we chose to investigate a vision system, and our development plan. Following the initial purpose and plan, we will talk about the development of the system. This portion of the paper will include a brief description of the commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware and software used in the system, followed by an examination of the initial hardware setup and the development of the visual inspection process. After the inspection system has been examined, its integration into a proprietary ATE software environment is reviewed. Special emphasis will be placed on describing the challenge of adding a robust visual inspection capability to an ATE software environment requiring the flexibility to support multiple types of visual inspections using a common architecture. Finally we will review the lessons learned from this development project and briefly explore other potential applications of an integrated visual inspection system. These include: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and circuit board inspection.