Idea: Branded tools as a service

A lot of hosting companies already offer one-click installs for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, dotProject. These are mostly content (CMS) tools. They’re useful, but they cover only a part of what a corporate customer would want. I would love to see a hosting company that offers branded tools as a service:

• let you register your domain name with them: mycompany.com
• first add a blog on www.mycompany.com (maybe WordPress)
• now add a helpdesk application on helpdesk.mycompany.com
• now add a project tracking tool on projects.mycompany.com
• now add a time tracking application on track.mycompany.com
• now add a web monitoring application on monitor.mycompany.com
• now add an asset management tool on assets.mycompany.com
• now add an applicant tracking system on jobs.mycompany.com
• now add a mailing list service on newsletter.mycompany.com
• now add …

It doesn’t really matter if these services are hosted on your account (e.g. with an open-source software, with Docker) or are actually SaaS offers (style FreshDesk/FreshService) where the hosting company takes care of the registration. But the beauty is knowing that you have easy solutions to problems that all companies have, and you have central management and invoicing.

Ideally, all these tools would also use the same user database (LDAP/OAuth), so that you only have to add/remove an employee on one place, and all the tools will use that user database as authentication source.

In fact, this idea of software portfolios already exist in software suites like Microsoft Office 365 (email/agenda/project planner/cloud storage/team communication/…) and Zoho One (CRM/emailing/software sprints/project planner/cloud storage/…).

Imagine doing this purely with self-hosted open-source software and then giving part of the money made back to the OSS community for support!