What's a Packaged Application?

by Paul Harmon

I spent a few days, recently, at a meeting with a lot of government IT people. As you might imagine, they have a good bit of money, and a lot of high-priority tasks they are eager to accomplish. There are major government programs to document enterprise architectures for government agencies. There are also major programs to introduce COTS (off-the-shelf components) to reduce application development time. Talking with both the buyers and the vendors, I quickly decided that packaged applications and COTS mean whatever the buyer and the vendors want them to mean.