Continuant's Tradition of PBX to Cloud Migration

One sees a lot after working in communications for over 28 years. Major players develop increasingly advanced systems to help businesses worldwide achieve their goals. Over the years, demands from customers have changed, competition has gotten fierce, and products and companies alike have risen and fallen.  

The emergence of cloud-based communication solutions changed the game forever. This would seem to be a recent change, and it’s been accelerated by the oncoming copper sunset, after which legacy PBX systems may no longer even be an option. 

However, cloud solutions aren’t a recent development. They've been around for decades now, and the conversation about how businesses migrate from a PBX to the cloud has been around for about as long. 

We’ve been involved in that conversation from early on, which has taught us a lot about the benefits and best practices regarding PBX to cloud migration.

How it all Began 

The late 90s and early 2000s saw the development of VoIP technology as part of the ever-expanding internet. It began with the “Internet Phone” in 1995 developed by Israeli company VocalTec, though it was primarily designed for consumers. Later, VoIP products like Net2Phone (1996) and 8x8’s Packet8 (1998) became more viable for both consumer and business use. 

Then Cisco began developing IP phones, and everything changed. VoIP became a viable option at the enterprise level. A vision of a world where landline telephony gave way to internet-based communications was in sight. This was also true on the consumer level with solutions like Vonage and Skype now on the market. 

Time went on and the internet only got bigger and stronger. By the time the 2010s rolled around, it was much more ubiquitous and reliable, especially where communication was concerned. This compelled companies like Cisco and Microsoft to experiment with the idea of unified communications, combining voice, video, messaging, and other collaboration features into one platform. 

It started in the 2000s with Cisco Unified Communications System and Microsoft Live Communications Server. Not very evocative names, of course, but that didn't last long. Cisco replaced its UC system with Webex after acquiring the company in 2007. Microsoft evolved its solution into MIcrosoft Lync, before replacing it with Skype for Business in 2015, and then replacing that with Microsoft Teams in 2019.  

The 2010s threw another curveball at the communications world: the advent of communications as a service. This gave rise to unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS), popularized by platforms like Zoom and Five9. 

Each event following the turn of the millennium made replacing legacy voice systems with advanced, feature rich, cloud-based solutions increasingly more viable, and yet many organizations simply didn’t. While the shiny new technology was appealing, it became clear that ripping out the old and replacing it with the new wasn’t the best step forward.  

Going from on-premises to the cloud would require a migration. 

The Great Cloud Migration 

On paper, a cloud-based UC solution is altogether better than a PBX phone system. It seems strange, then, that an organization would opt to keep its legacy systems or use them in tandem with something like Cisco Webex. Throughout the 2010s, however, we can see plenty of reasons why this was the case. 

By the time viable enterprise UC solutions rolled around, the organizations they were made for had already made massive investments in their PBX systems. Simply ripping them out and replacing them with the new systems would be financially disastrous.

On top of that, many of these UC solutions once lacked features the organizations relied on, and often didn’t have robust enough security to be compliant. That’s changed a lot since the 2020s, but it’s important to note what informed these organizations’ decisions years ago.  

This plus a general resistance to change replaced a swift replacement method with a long-term migration. Unfortunately, the 2020s made sure most organizations didn’t quite have the luxury.  

First, the Covid-19 pandemic forced companies to go to the cloud quickly to support an increasingly remote workforce. Later, word began spreading of copper lines being decommissioned, which would cause phone companies to dramatically increase their customers’ bills. 

Organizations today are still migrating to the cloud, but they’re feeling more pressure than ever. The migration process has become a higher priority, but not necessarily easier to do in-house. Knowing this, companies that partner with these organizations to assist in their migration have come about offering fantastic services that make the process much easier and ultimately cost-effective. 

Then there’s Continuant, offering the same service with a vast backlog of experience. 

A Full Cloud Migration with Continuant 

So where does your organization find itself today? Migrating to the cloud is surely within your best interest, but what steps do you need to take to get from your current system to a cloud-based UCaaS and CCaaS solution? 

Our friends at Adient asked the same question a few years ago. How could they pull off a migration from an Avaya PBX to Microsoft Teams for a company with around 85,000 employees located in over 30 countries?  

Thanks to Adient’s partnership with Continuant, it was able to accomplish this massive migration in record time with minimal disruptions. Its new UC solution also came with a cloud-based omnichannel contact center to complete the package. 

Our role along the way was to assess Adient’s infrastructure and userbase to determine exactly what hardware and software they needed and guide them in the deploying process. Once that was done, we continued to provide managed services to make sure Adient’s new system ran smoothly and to continue assisting users as they adjusted to the change via ACM (Adoption and Change Management). 

We can do the same thing for your organization. We’ll use our expertise in legacy voice systems to determine what you need, then use our expertise in modern communications to help you find the UCaaS and CCaaS solution that fits. Whether it’s Microsoft, Cisco UC, or Zoom, we’ll make sure you’re well-equipped in the cloud before the copper sunset comes.