Facilitating the Software Shopping Process

Shopping for software. Who's job is that in your company? Some organizations are looking for the best price. Others are looking for satisfaction of requirements. Some are required to find products with serious support. Again, who shops? Is it a junior engineer on a new project? Is it the purchasing department?

Since there is such a wide variety of software products, this discussion will be confined particularly to system software packages or libraries that perform commonly needed functions and shorten the application development cycle. You may be able to write them yourself, but would prefer to find something that is already written so that you can focus on your core competency.