I'm working for a large company that's currently overhauling its network infrastructure, and several departments within the company have expressed interest in [APM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_performance_management), desiring a tool for performance monitoring and error catching, customer tracking, business transaction management and the like.

However, the organisation's size, and the fact that different interest groups wish for different features, has made it quite difficult to choose the right one between the available options. There are quite a few APM tools out there, both open source and commercial, and they seem to be boast somewhat different features, focusing on different things.

As part of my master's thesis, it's fallen to me to map out these requirements and make a recommendation based on the results. I'm *somewhat* familiar with requirements engineering in general from an academic perspective, but that has always been from the perspective of building a new software application, not selecting between pre-existing ones (which shoe fits the best?)

Are there any academically sound models for performing requirement elicitation and analysis under these sorts of conditions? In short, helping a customer, represented by multiple different internal interest groups, pick a specific piece of software between a plethora of available ones? Or is this something where the standard IEEE should be used as-is?