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in particular requires well-managed integra-
tion of disparate systems not originally de-
signed to interoperate.
COTS middleware components provide
core software infrastructures that help devel-
opers build Internet-enabled business appli-
cations.2 Middleware offers prebuilt services
that support, for example, off-the-shelf dis-
tributed transaction processing, security, and
directory and naming services. It also provides
specialized components that let developers in-
tegrate many different legacy systems and de-
sign and deploy new business processes that
integrate multiple distributed applications. As
the COTS middleware market grows, how-
ever, product selection becomes complex, and
organizations risk investing in products that
ultimately don’t meet their requirements.3
We developed i-Mate (Middleware Archi-
tecture and Technology Evaluation for the
Internet) to help organizations accelerate
and improve the reliability of the COTS
middleware acquisition process. This spe-
cialized software engineering process takes a
three-tiered approach to COTS middleware
evaluation that provides
1. A prefabricated, reusable set of generic
requirements based on analysis of mid-
dleware component characteristics
2. A process for incorporating application-
specific requirements, weighting individ-
ual requirements, and ranking specific
COTS middleware products against these
requirements
3. Tool support for capturing and rapidly ex-
ploring requirement tradeoffs and generat-
ing reports showing how the middleware
products compare against the requirements
We designed the i-Mate process for organi-
zations operating at Level 3 in the Software
Engineering Institute’s Software Acquisition
Capability Maturity Model,4 especially in
its support for the User Requirements and
Acquisition Risk Management key process
feature
Accelerating COTS
Middleware Acquisition:
The i-Mate Process
Anna Liu, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia
Ian Gorton, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
COTS middleware
speeds e-business
application
deployment but can
be difficult to select.
i-Mate provides a
structured software
engineering process
for reliable COTS
middleware
acquisition.
M ost major organizations now use some commercial-off-the-shelf middleware components to run their businesses. Key driv-ers behind this growth include ever-increasing Internet usageand the ongoing need to integrate heterogeneous legacy sys-
tems to streamline business processes.1 As organizations do more business
online, they need scalable, high-performance software infrastructures to
handle transactions and provide access to core systems. Legacy system access
middleware