Flexibility, Supportability, Scalability, and Value. This site is filled with information to validate this claim, but to make a point,  there are no other packages on the market that offer the power, ease of use, or tremendous value delivered by MiDAS.
MiDAS Commerce Appliances are new pre-configured and pre-certified-for-MiDAS servers built by Dell, pre- loaded with the MiDAS Commerce Engine, delivered ready to plug and play. These servers follow in the MiDAS tradition of delivering ready to deploy commerce solutions.
While we have not yet found any open-source shopping carts with anything near the core functionality of MiDAS, there are certainly some decent systems out there. But remember, MiDAS is a fully featured ecommerce framework, and that's hard to build and support for free. We understand, the lure of something-for-nothing is powerful, but successfully implementing, operating and maintaining these systems is extremely difficult. These systems typically require a high level of Linux experience, some software development skills, and a solid understanding of security matters (as you may be dealing with code from unknown sources, etc). In addtion, the initial deployment will typically require a great deal of time (almost always unsupported) to get the system operating and integrated with your site design. You will either have to spend this time, or pay someone else to do it - time and money that could be spent working on your strategic commerce goals. There is a lot of "shopping cart software" out there, but if what you want is a solution, you still need MiDAS.
OK, let's assume you still want to think about an open source system. From here there are two additional important points to consider:
First, who is responsible for supporting this system if something goes wrong? Who maintains the underlying code if a security vulnerability is found? In short, how do you make sure that it will keep working?
Second, what is your future path? Will future upgrades be practical to deploy? Will you be "stuck in time"? How do you maintain the system? If you later need to integrate your ecommerce system with your financial system, where will you find out how to do this?
MiDAS delivers fully supported rapid deployment ecommerce solutions targeted at merchants who require maximum uptime and desire the ability to stay ahead of competitors with a  perpetually upgraded solution. Complete MiDAS implementations typically, due to the savings in implementation costs, cost less than open source based ecommerce solutions. Still, the real cost of an unsupported system is the impact it eventually has on your bottom line. That's where MiDAS just makes more sense.
Summary: If you are a UNIX expert and don't mind focusing on managing the system yourself, open source systems may work for you. If you are a merchant who wants to focus on selling your product, then MiDAS is the right choice.
Hardware Requirements: We have successful test records for simulating 1000 users against a Windows 2000 Server (running IIS only, SQL Server was on a separate system)) with 128 MB of RAM and a Pentium 1 - 166 MHz processor. The point is, you don't need a rocket!
[Test was performed with MiDAS 3.0, on a generic white box, running IDE disks in a mirrored configuration]
Typical recent customer deployments are based on dual processor XEON based systems with 1GB or more of memory. Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2003 Server are required, as well as SQL Server 2000.
MiDAS is also offered as a pre-configured appliance based on Dell servers. Click Here for more details.
Software Requirements: MiDAS is built on the Microsoft platform and requires the following software elements:
- Windows 2000 or 2003 Server (Any Version - Small Business Server not reccomended)
- IIS 5 or greater
- Full Version Microsoft SQL Server Version 7 or Newer Recommended (SQL Server 2000 preferred)
The MiDAS installation includes the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE 2000) as part of the installation package. The MSDE is the runtime equivalent of Microsoft's SQL Server, but is meant for development, staging, or limited deployments only as it does not scale up like the full version.
MiDAS is available as a fully functional 30 day demo, you can also preview screenshots or a read-only online demo by clicking here.
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