Comment by intelVISA

>I remember the CTO of a big American bank telling me they didn't want to develop any software in-house. Their plan was to buy everything in. At the time I thought it was rather strange but having dealt with a lot of enterprise software since then I can see why.

It's a very pragmatic choice for the majority of business use cases. It should be more common imo, but some execs enjoy the empire building aspect and underestimate TCO when looking at cheap offshore dev resources.