Recruiting, managing, and paying people to run those restaurants with the level of dedication that an invested franchise owner has would be challenging. There are a lot of great managers out there to hire, but probably at a higher rate than McDonald's (or any competitor) would want to pay.
There are, specially on Cloud business. They are called as Cloud Partners who resell AWS and Azure which they bundle it with their consulting solutions. Good examples are Accenture, Infosys ...
Franchise stores and restaurants like McDonalds don't compete with each other as they have a physical attribute to them insuring this. IT Franchises however would be free to compete with each other making this business model pretty much impossible. The only way I see this working is with Franchises limited to one per country/state, who are specialised in regards to language, customer preferences and local laws.
What is there to franchise? As others pointed out software is easy to sell to anyone. Maybe you can franchise onsight support, but the big customers for onsight support mostly want a national company to take care of them, so no franchises as it is all the national number. The little companies maybe, but the little companies don't need the big brand, they learn which local company provides support.
More like ”we have this development flow and tooling that just works and everyone knows it so we have a strong brand, let’s lease it to others and avoid taxes by making them pay back appropriate interest on corporate loans to the parent company”, i.e. the McDonalds model.
I think the advantage for a restaurant is the contracts with large scale suppliers. You could do the same with hardware and software perhaps, but the advantages and disadvantages would look different.
