this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Yes, I've seen a few of those and usually their customers are smaller companies that want to cheap out on IT and/or don't consider it a priority and a cost. The irony here is that smaller companies cant fund the integration costs and development required to have useful open-source and bigger companies can but they'll simply move on to MS/other proprietary stuff because of time-to-market, corruption or because some manager thinks its safer to go with proprietary.
Now think if you after that type of costumer they'll never respect you nor pay you decently, they'll always bitch for discounts, free support and put you through all kinds of hell as everything they'll ever need is urgent and everything you propose is way too expensive or unreasonable in their little heads. <-- trust me, been there :P
Kolab for email/collaboration is a good example at that https://kolabnow.com/, they're one of the major contributors of RoundCube and sell it with a bunch of other in-house developed solutions.
Anyways a few years ago I worked for a health insurance company (~200 employees, ~1 million customers) and they contracted services from a 3 guy company that had a business model similar to what you're looking for. They managed the workstations and laptops, networking and the infrastructure where the in-house software dev team deployed (OpenLDAP, Samba, Linphone/Other VOIP, Self hosted email, Jira, tons of VMs for developers, local datacenter and 3rd party datacenter).
At some point the health insurance company bought them out because they were going bankrupt and became employees as well. At the time they said it was really hard because they were unable to get more big customers like that one and the smaller ones weren't profitable (time to setup something wasn't worth it).
Nowadays the company (with those same guys and few others) runs everything on Azure + Office 365 + Jira Cloud + AWS for internally developed stuff.