I'll answer as best as I can
> Please tell us more about your setup.
We're a Java office in TX with a remote call center in OR and a handful of remote employees ( Chicago ).
> What type of work does the company and you do?
I'm the director of development, we're a j2ee web application development shop with special expertise in Oracle
> Approximately how many users work like this?
All of us ~30
> Does this company operate primarily as a standard physical office environment, or is this a distributed(work from home) startup?
A couple of my developers work from home 3 days a week and most of ops ( the network guys ) work from wherever and, apparently, whenever they want. They're pretty hot shit, published authors, speakers at LISA, etc so they're left alone most of the time.
> Where are the servers, on-site, datacenter, cloud?
We keep our staging and UAT servers on site and colo for production + another colo for failover
> Approximately how many servers?
I have no idea, I know we have some serious SAN gear for the databases. We probably have around 50 virtual servers in our testing setup and maybe 20-25 production server clusters with an average of 3 nodes each. Some physical some virtual.
> What type of applications are used, web, small applications like QB, MS Exchange or SQL systems?
Web applications, we develop/maintain some very large rewards and loyalty programs for the big banks. RDBMS is Oracle, email and IM is handled through Zimbra, project management is handled with Atlassen Jira self hosted.
> What are the negative aspects of this system?
The only problem i've ever faced is the VPN endpoints not staying connected. VPN connectivity becomes mission critical because without it no work can get done. I don't know what they're using for the VPN server, I know ops is a big fan of OpenBSD so it wouldn't surprise me if that's what they are using.