Off the shelf software Versus inhouse development

Being in this very stormy market I have heard people talking about where to cut costs but keep things running. The two things I hear the most are cut jobs and purchase off the shelf software. Knowing that the business needs someone to contact for support even OpenSource products would be purchased in that they would buy support contracts for the applications.

This made me think. What is cheaper purchasing software/support from vendors or having your support as a warm body in a seat? Especially a warm body that can read/write many popular programming languages.

If you look at the cost of each product individually:
$4,000 - Enterprise Wiki / Sharepoint (per instance)
$2,000 - Enterprise CMS
$1,700 - Small Databases
$30,000 - Helpdesk software
$100,000 - Reporting software
$200,000 - Email software
$100,000 - Desktop Management software
$100,000 - Backup software

They don't look to astronomical. I am low balling many of these but they are pretty close. You could purchase all of this software and get the warm feelings of (at least the time of purchase) having support. Some like the Email software and Database software will still cost you extra for the support but people tend to forget that. Or you could bring in a couple of good programmer/troubleshooters that have used Open Source products for a while and roll out many of these things with only the cost of 2-3 developers. Granted to get really good, sharp people it is going to cost some money. Especially if you want them to stay around. You could easily get 2 for half the price of what you would have into the purchased software. Between the two keeping 8 applications alive and kicking would be no problem. They would even have time to implement features that you want/need. Imaging that having the ability to get a feature in a product like an Enterprise Email solution!!!

Which that leads me to the biggest thing with bringing on Open Source specialists. They will want to contribute back to the projects. Let them. Encourage them. Drive them.