Oh sure...some companies had their own setup. I think one of the disk drive manufacturers had their own BBS (Western Digital?). But I think most companies looking into this kind of service saw the Compuserv infrastructure (in particular, all the ways to access it...dial, X.25, leased line, etc., with huge numbers of local PoPs) and said "I'll take that because building ourselves it would suck".
And...there was a time between this and "Internet for all the things", when for consumers, AOL was the place to get drivers and such. But that's an even farther digression from the BBS topic (other than to point out AOL started out with BBS software).
