COTS-based software procurement and systems integration are closely related. Considering software development as a process of assembling collections of existing components has potentially several significant advantages:

• Reduced software development costs.
• Reduced software maintenance costs.
• Improved reuse.

This view of systems integration using COTS is attractive, a fact attested to by the US Navy's policy of 1993 that "a government solution and not a COTS solution constitutes disapproving the COTS solution" [7]. The significance attached to COTS in the US is further attested by the initiation of a substantial research programme at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

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