COTS software in science operations, is it worth it?

Often, perhaps not often enough, we choose Common Off the Shelf (COTS) software for integration in our systems. These range from repositories to databases and tools we use on a daily basis. It is very hard to assess the effectiveness of these choices. While none of us would consider a project specific word processing solution when LaTeX (or even Word) many will consider writing their own data management systems. We will look at some of the COTS we have used and attempt to explain how we came to the decision and if it was worth it.