Transforming enterprise telephony – A real-world journey to the cloud
Author: Tim Jalland
Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions
Tuesday February 11, 2025
For enterprises with sprawling legacy telephony systems, the transition to modern cloud-based solutions can feel overwhelming. The scale, complexity, and lack of visibility often pose significant barriers. However, as one global enterprise discovered, the right tools and approach can turn these challenges into opportunities.
This is the story of how a company with 75,000 users across 430 global sites transformed its telephony estate, unlocking savings and laying the groundwork for a seamless migration to Microsoft Teams Phone.
Tackling the challenge of a complex UC landscape
The customer had a telephony environment with:
- 150,000 phones, 20,000 phone lines, and 20,000 analog gateway ports
- A lack of visibility into active and inactive devices, services, and lines
- Aging Cisco hardware scattered across hundreds of locations, with no clear roadmap for modernization
The enterprise faced all these challenges while preparing to migrate to a cloud-based UC platform. Managed by a third-party service provider, the company had limited control over its environment and no clear picture of how to move forward.
Laying the foundation with VOSS Discover
Enter VOSS Discover, a solution designed to uncover the unknown in complex telephony estates. Within weeks, VOSS delivered a comprehensive map of the customer’s entire telephony setup, analyzing 10 million call data records to identify:
- 17,000 inactive licensed users
- Over 25% of physical phones sitting unused
- 30% of Cisco Jabber soft clients abandoned
- 25% of extension lines inactive
- 40% of voicemail mailboxes inactive
- Over 50 closed sites still configured in the system
These insights were game-changing. They not only revealed inefficiencies but also provided a clear roadmap for rightsizing the estate and preparing for a smoother migration.
Unlocking 23% cost savings through rightsizing
The findings enabled the customer to eliminate unnecessary licenses, decommission inactive devices, and optimize resources. This rightsizing effort led to a 23% reduction in operating costs over three years, delivering immediate and ongoing financial benefits.
Once the estate was cleaned up, the company leveraged VOSS Migrate to transition from its legacy Cisco environment to Microsoft Teams Phone. Using advanced automation, VOSS Migrate ensured a rapid and disruption-free migration by:
- Discovering, extracting, transforming, validating, and loading large volumes of data
- Providing clean, accurate data to speed up the migration process
- Reducing the time, cost, and resources needed for the transition
The results: A future-ready telephony infrastructure
This customer journey demonstrates the transformative impact of combining robust discovery with powerful migration tools. The enterprise achieved significant cost savings by eliminating inactive assets, reducing licensing, maintenance, and support costs. The migration process to the cloud was faster and more efficient, thanks to the clean, up-to-date inventory, which minimized disruption and further reduced costs. Real-time insights into the global telephony environment provided better visibility, enabling smarter decision-making. The optimized infrastructure now supports future growth with reduced operational complexity and fewer legacy systems to manage, while centralized management has streamlined ongoing UC operations with enhanced reporting and control.
A roadmap for other enterprises
If your organization is struggling with the complexities of legacy telephony systems, this case study highlights a proven path forward. With the right tools and insights, you can reduce costs, modernize infrastructure, and make the move to the cloud with confidence.
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