fbartels
I think a real world example for this would be https://www.collaboraoffice.com/about-us/. And looking at it from the outside a positive example as well. At least I could not find any public beef between collabora and the document foundation (as the organisation behind libreoffice).
My personal favorite is Cloudron, as they have an app concept that only needs minimal human maintenance. And you could even combine it with an LDAP server like ucs for the user management.
To answer your question: In europe there is currently a push to get more independent of (us) cloud providers. On top of that Cern has decided to embrace Open Source and companies supporting it, so in the end its not really about cutting costs, but getting more control.
Cern is actually for some time already using Owncloud for this. https://owncloud.com/cern-smashbox-and-owncloud-collaboratio...
https://cloudron.io/pricing.html
But it's open source, so if you can life without the automatic updates and the app store (install apps and updates manually through their cli utility) you can still install more apps.
Nowadays I am running Cloudron for these use cases. Here the big plus in apps is that each app runs on docker and has to use the Cloudron docker vase image (with very few paths having write access), through that apps and the server can easily backed up and restored in exactly the same state (user, data, apps installed).
At least for Mattermost I have to disagree with the "complex to install". All you need is a sql database (MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres), for production you then also should put a reverse proxy in front.
With "very few clients" you are referring to client software, correct?