I don't really know if Server Fault is the idea place to be posting this, but I'm more interested in people's opinions than anything else.
We currently outsource a datacenter to a 3rd party who, for the last 5 years, has provided us impeccible service at a really good price. In the last 12 months however the service level has dropped and dropped as he is focussing his energy into other endevours (non-IT related), until yesterday when our connection was down for over 9 hours, and he didn't check his voicemail, emails, or smoke signals, followed by (what we suspect are) lies about where he was and why he didn't respond.
We figure it will cost about $10,000 to purchase the equipment and licenses that are currently with him and chuck them into a colocation facility on our own, but of course then you have all the added bonus of having to manage it, and re-configuring everything (DNS, etc)
If we offered him $50,000 for his business, we suspect he would take it and run, because he doesn't want to really be doing IT hosting any more (and our business accounts for about 75% of his companies revenue). That way we get his staff (and thus their knowledge and expertise), plus his other clients.
I'm not interested in ROI calculations (I havent given enough detail for that, and anyway we can do that on our own), but I'm more interested to see if anyone else out there has done a similar thing? Been involved with the purchase an outsourcer? Or even bringing outsourced services in-house?
The services he provide for us are in line with our core competancies. The only reason it's outsourced at the moment was a political decision that made sense 5 years ago.
Clarification: The main issue we have is his lack of attention (he has taken up being a project manager for construction and renovations). He schedules downtime without telling us, and is uncontactable for days on end. His internal staff are great (although I think there's only one person left), and the actual hardware and ISP links are fine. Mainly we're looking for a way to remove him from the equation. We'd love to keep his Volume Licensing agreement he has with MS as it's pretty damn good (not sure how he swindled it).