Are you talking about a company you are currently working for? Interesting story though ;-).

Based on my limited experience working for a big corporation, there's hardly any substitute for anything that a company might need (such as a portal solution for e.g.) in-house using it's own development resources. Before my 'tenure' with the company, it used to have a 3-rd party to support it's portal technology. However, the more it was used (the portal), the more useless it appeared to be. Normally, a 3rd party technology provider wouldn't design something that would fit everyone's need. Considering our company, there was a lot of stuff that we required (both flexiblity and functionality) that wasn't present in portal piece that we bought. From time to time, various technical issues would arise that required extensive technical support and attention. This was just a few of a number of factors that lead us to realize we had to implement our own 'solution' from ground-up. We had to eventually sit down and design our own system around our present and future needs.

As of now, all that we have now has been built in-house. And I can't find an employee who'd regret it a tiny bit. Of course, I guess we couldn't have accomplished this if we were a smaller company with corresponding budget (= small). But if the company you are talking about is a fairly large enterprise, than I'm inclined to thinking that hardly any 3rd party solution (even that of company) would suffice your needs (especially, the ones you've mentioned.. such as greater security etc.)

Thanks for listening to my rant ;-).

"There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." -- Confession of Faith