What lead to his termination? Was the on-call team not thrilled with having to (even minimally) deal with issues from the systems of another company?

That was a major part of it. I never completely understood why, but for some reason the majority of the staff really hated that project. I though it was a brilliant move. The problem may have been that people attempted to over-engineer the project and handle scenarios that wasn't in scope, setting unrealistic goal resulting in a lot of pretty dumb and boring work.

Another part was that was yet another service which we technically didn't offer, which he sold. He was always very upfront about the fact that he knew that a lot of the stuff he sold was not actually something we offered or necessarily knew how to do. That pissed of a lot of people, but in hindsight, five years later: He sold the right things and we should embraced those sales/potential sale, because the local market has moved in the direction he was going.

> a lot of the stuff he sold was not actually something we offered or necessarily knew how to do

This may not be the situation but I’m willing to bet he created an insane amount of chaos for everyone else by doing this. Existing projects constantly getting delayed or cancelled because he sold something that wasn’t planned for.

At my last job, we had a department who delegated all of their quarterly goals to the development team. They made us responsible for accomplishing their goals on top of everything else we were doing.

They delayed critical projects for years for marginal gains.