[Argorak]

For many companies, the chat is critical. Also, if one person has to fix the chat for 1 hour a month, you are easily paying more for that person then for the external service.

I would question that hosting in-house would be cheaper. As stated in other threads: that's less then the cost of an employee qualified to run all those services.

[teacup50]

I set up OpenFire ~7 years ago for our company, and I think I've spent less than two hours on maintaining it in that time.