Ready-Made or Tailor-Made?
Exploring the Cost Benefits of Off-the-Shelf and Open-Source Products, and the Need for Custom Solutions in Industrial Tech
In the rapidly evolving landscape of Operational Technology (OT), the choice between Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) products and custom, in-house solutions has become a central strategic decision. Many industries are drawn to COTS offerings for their promise of quick deployment, lower upfront costs, and standardized features. These ready-made tools can indeed streamline operations and accelerate modernization.
However, the equation isn’t always so simple. Certain sectors, especially those with legacy systems, highly specialized workflows, or stringent regulatory demands, often find that only tailor-made solutions can truly meet their needs. While cost and efficiency remain key considerations, the decision to go with a pre-built or custom system depends on a broader set of factors: Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), scalability, integration complexity, and critically, configuration management.
Configuration management is often the overlooked linchpin in this equation. It determines whether a COTS solution remains manageable and flexible over time or becomes a source of hidden costs and operational friction. Understanding this aspect is essential to making a sustainable, informed choice in the build-vs-buy debate.
What Is COTS in the Context of Industrial Operations?
Within the realm of Operational Technology (OT), which includes Industrial Control Systems (ICS), SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) refers to pre-packaged software and hardware solutions that are commercially available and intended for broad, cross-industry use. Importantly, COTS includes both proprietary and open-source software, an often misunderstood point. Many assume open-source implies custom or non-commercial, but this is not the case. So long as the software is publicly distributed, not custom-built, and reusable across organizations, it qualifies as COTS. Open-source COTS products, while often free of licensing costs, still fall under the COTS umbrella because they are commercially accessible, broadly supported, and widely deployable in industrial environments.
COTS products are valued for their standardized functionality, rapid deployment, and vendor-backed or community-based support. They often come with regular updates, documented integration pathways, and compatibility with a range of existing systems. For organizations under pressure to modernize or expand quickly, these benefits are attractive. In OT environments, examples of COTS include ready-made SCADA platforms, automation software, sensors, and industrial cybersecurity tools. These offerings promise time-to-value and a lower barrier to adoption, at least at the outset.
But standardization is both COTS’s strength and its limitation. While these products are designed for versatility, they are not always optimized for the nuanced demands of highly specialized or legacy-bound operations.
What COTS Is Not in OT
COTS isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s not built to handle the unique and often complex challenges found in industries where systems are tightly connected, and performance or compliance demands leave no room for compromise. In these cases, building your own solution can be the better path. Whether it’s a custom SCADA system or a specialized automation controller, self-developed tools can deliver capabilities that standard products simply can’t. These custom systems are often deeply woven into a company’s operations and are designed to meet needs that are too specific, or change too frequently for off-the-shelf software to keep up with.
However, this level of customization comes with clear trade-offs: higher development and maintenance costs, more resource-intensive lifecycle management, and the risk of falling behind if internal teams can’t keep up with evolving technologies. Without strong configuration management and long-term planning, custom systems can become brittle and hard to adapt.
Yet, for some organizations, customization isn’t optional, it’s a business necessity. In industries with strict compliance needs, unique operational processes, or where technology is core to the offering, custom-built systems may be the only viable way to remain competitive. While the upfront and ongoing costs may seem higher, well-designed custom solutions can become a strategic asset, creating differentiation, enabling unique services, and offering tighter alignment with customer needs. And it's worth remembering: serving customers always incurs cost, whether through support, integration, or feature adaptation. The question is not whether there’s a cost, but whether your architecture gives you the control and agility to manage that cost in a way that supports long-term success.
COTS vs. Self-Developed Solutions in OT: More Than a Cost Decision
The decision between adopting a Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) product or developing a custom solution in OT is rarely straightforward. While cost is often the first factor discussed, the real complexity lies in long-term sustainability, adaptability, and risk management.
Self-developed solutions offer the highest degree of customization. For organizations with unique operational requirements, regulatory obligations, or legacy systems that cannot be easily modernized, building in-house can seem like the only viable path. These solutions can be deeply aligned with internal processes, but this alignment comes with significant demands:
Development Time: Custom systems typically require years to build and refine, especially when domain-specific expertise is limited.
Maintenance Burden: All future updates, patches, and security fixes must be handled internally for custom solutions, requiring dedicated teams and resources. But even with COTS products, the responsibility for integration testing, system validation, and overall quality assurance remains with the organization. You can outsource development or license functionality, but you cannot outsource accountability. Whether it’s a vendor-provided patch or a self-written feature, the impact on your operational environment must be verified in-house to ensure stability, compliance, and safety.
Vendor Lock-in Reversed: While avoiding third-party vendor dependency, companies instead become dependent on their own internal teams, which may present challenges in continuity and scalability.
COTS products, by contrast, offer well-tested, immediately deployable functionality supported by external vendors. They are designed for interoperability, often feature built-in security compliance, and receive regular updates as part of their licensing. For many use cases, this makes them attractive from a cost and time-to-deployment perspective.
But these advantages can quickly erode when a COTS solution lacks the flexibility to adapt to evolving requirements. Integration with niche or legacy systems may require extensive customization, negating the initial simplicity. And if configuration management isn’t carefully handled, even small changes in the vendor’s roadmap can create cascading disruptions. Moreover, relying on COTS also introduces vendor-driven risk. Even mature products can suddenly become unstable assets if the vendor is acquired, changes its licensing model, or sunsets key features. Recent examples, like Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the subsequent licensing changes, underscore how rapidly the economics of a solution can shift, especially in tightly coupled systems where switching costs are high.
To mitigate these risks, many organizations are adopting a hybrid strategy: using COTS products for what they do best, while putting greater emphasis on standardized configuration management, strong interface layers, and integration automation. This is where the Integrated Hybrid Approach (IHA) comes into play. By combining the flexibility of custom solutions with the scalability of COTS, IHA enables organizations to tailor specific components while maintaining the efficiency and support of off-the-shelf tools. This strategy decouples the core business logic from any one product’s evolution, ensuring a greater degree of portability and long-term resilience.
In short, this isn’t just a binary choice between “cheap and fast” vs. “expensive and tailored.” It’s about choosing a solution that can scale, evolve, and be managed effectively over time, even in the face of change outside your control. The key to making this approach work is robust configuration management, ensuring all components, whether COTS or custom-built, integrate seamlessly and can adapt as the business or technology landscape shifts.
The Role of Configuration Management: The Hidden Lever in Total Cost of Ownership
One of the most underestimated, but critical, factors in the success of COTS products in OT environments is configuration management. While COTS solutions are marketed as plug-and-play, true operational success depends heavily on how well these systems are configured, deployed, and maintained across installations.
Configuration management is the discipline that brings order and predictability to that process. It ensures that systems are adapted to the operational environment, integrated reliably with existing infrastructure, and deployed consistently across multiple sites. When done well, it reduces misconfigurations, simplifies troubleshooting, and significantly lowers operational risk. However, the benefits of configuration management are not automatic, they hinge on scale. For smaller deployments (e.g., one to five installations), the investment required to build a robust configuration management process, complete with documentation, tools, and governance may outweigh the immediate returns. In such cases, the “overhead” of formal configuration practices can feel unnecessary or even burdensome.
But as deployments scale, the picture changes dramatically. Configuration management becomes not just beneficial, it becomes essential. Here’s why:
Consistency at Scale: With defined configuration templates and processes, each new deployment follows a standardized path. This reduces errors, ensures interoperability, and enforces compliance across multiple sites or customers.
Lower Support Costs: Proper configuration from the outset reduces the number of incidents and performance issues downstream, easing the load on support teams and reducing reactive maintenance costs.
Accelerated Time-to-Deployment: Standardized configuration enables faster rollouts, helping organizations respond quickly to market demands or operational changes.
Operational Scalability: Perhaps most importantly, configuration management enables growth. It allows an organization to scale deployments across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of units/customers without a corresponding increase in personnel or complexity.
In short, configuration management is the foundation that determines whether a COTS solution remains manageable or becomes a liability. It's the silent enabler that transforms off-the-shelf tools into strategic assets in complex OT environments.
COTS and Total Cost of Ownership in OT: A Lifecycle Perspective
In Operational Technology, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) must be understood holistically. It’s not merely about the sticker price of a product, it’s about what it takes to operate, support, and evolve that product over time. When weighing COTS solutions against custom-developed alternatives, the full lifecycle must be considered:
Initial Acquisition Cost:
COTS solutions typically involve clear licensing or subscription costs, often bundled with vendor support. In contrast, self-developed solutions incur significant upfront investments in development time, internal expertise, and project management.Maintenance and Upgrades:
COTS products benefit from vendor-maintained updates, patches, and improvements, which can reduce the burden on internal teams (in theory). But the reality is that even with COTS, internal expertise remains essential. Updates must be validated, tested, and sometimes adapted to the specific environment. Custom solutions, meanwhile, require full ownership of maintenance and evolution, demanding long-term investment in both tooling and people.In both cases, expertise is the true limiting factor. Whether managing a vendor’s roadmap or maintaining custom code, the ability to understand, adapt, and evolve the system depends on people, on institutional knowledge, engineering judgment, and continuity of skills. As teams shift, age, or restructure, technical continuity becomes harder to sustain. The most sustainable approach is not necessarily the one with fewer lines of code, but the one that aligns best with the organization’s capacity to maintain and grow its own competence.
Training and Integration:
Both models involve onboarding and integration efforts. However, COTS often offers standardized documentation, training materials, and partner ecosystems, accelerating deployment and reducing the hidden cost of user enablement.
The Open-Source Factor: Flexibility Without the Price Tag?
Open-source COTS solutions occupy a unique space in the cost-efficiency conversation. With no licensing fees and broad community-driven support, they offer compelling economic advantages, especially for organizations that possess the internal capability to customize and support them.
Lower Entry Costs:
Without vendor licensing, the initial barrier is significantly reduced.Avoiding Vendor Lock-In:
Open-source platforms can be modified directly to meet changing operational needs or regulatory demands, offering a degree of freedom that proprietary platforms may limit.Support Trade-Offs:
Open-source is not synonymous with “free.” For production environments, enterprise-level support or internal expertise is often necessary to ensure reliability and security, costs that must be factored into the broader TCO equation.
When used strategically, open-source COTS tools can provide a middle ground between the flexibility of custom solutions and the affordability of off-the-shelf options.
Conclusion: There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in OT
The decision between COTS and custom-developed solutions in OT is not binary, nor is it static. It must be revisited as operational scale, business goals, and regulatory environments evolve.
COTS solutions, when deployed with a clear configuration strategy, can unlock cost efficiencies, shorten deployment times, and reduce long-term operational risks. At scale, especially across multiple installations or customers, they often offer the best balance of performance and predictability.
However, for highly specialized use cases or low-scale deployments, custom solutions may still be the more rational choice, provided the organization is prepared to shoulder the ongoing burden of maintenance and support. That said, a hybrid approach (Integrated Hybrid Approach), combining COTS (open-source or licensed) with standardization and a well-designed configuration management system can offer the best of both worlds. This approach allows organizations to leverage the speed and cost-efficiency of COTS while investing in the flexibility and control that come from standardized integration, automation, and ongoing configuration management.
By embracing this hybrid strategy (IHA), companies can better manage complexity, reduce the risk of vendor lock-in, and ensure that their systems are adaptable and scalable over time.
In short:
COTS works, when you understand its boundaries. Custom works, when you understand its commitments. The smartest choice in OT isn’t about picking one over the other, but about recognizing when, where, and how to apply each. In many cases, a Integrated Hybrid Approach, leveraging the strengths of both COTS and custom solutions, supported by standardization and strong configuration management, can provide the optimal balance for long-term operational and financial success.