For years, the business phone system was something companies rarely thought about until it stopped working.

A PBX sat in a closet or equipment room, desk phones sat on desks, and as long as employees could make and receive calls, there wasn’t much reason to change anything. Many of those systems were built incredibly well. In fact, plenty of businesses are still operating telephone systems that were installed 10, 15, or even 20 years ago.

But the communications market around those systems has changed considerably.

Cloud-based Unified Communications as a Service, commonly called UCaaS, has moved from an emerging technology into a mainstream option for business communications. Yet despite years of migration toward cloud communications, a surprisingly large portion of the market remains somewhere between traditional telephony and a fully cloud-based environment.

That creates an interesting situation for businesses evaluating what comes next.

According to AVANT’s 2025 UCaaS State of Disruption report, 58% of U.S. companies with more than $1 million in revenue already use cloud-based UCaaS. At the same time, the report cites 39 million UCaaS users in the United States compared with approximately 135 million employees in the national workforce.

In other words, the migration is well underway, but it is far from finished.

The Legacy PBX Isn’t Disappearing Overnight

It is easy to talk about cloud communications as though every business has already made the transition. Anyone who works around real telephone systems knows that’s not the case.

There are still businesses running traditional PBXs, analog devices, older digital phones and hybrid environments. Some organizations have good reasons for keeping them.

AVANT’s report provides an interesting look at why.

Among organizations still using legacy telephone systems, 42% cited the learning curve associated with changing systems. Another 37% cited bandwidth problems at certain locations, while 35% were dealing with contracts containing punitive early-termination provisions. Twenty-five percent cited budget constraints.

Those numbers tell an important story.

A functioning legacy phone system isn’t necessarily being kept because management believes old technology is better. Sometimes replacing it simply hasn’t become important enough yet.

If the phones work, employees understand them, the contract is still active and the business has other capital priorities, leaving the system alone can appear to be the safest decision.

Eventually, however, something usually changes.

Often, the Trigger Is the Existing System

One of the most interesting findings in the report is why businesses begin evaluating another communications platform.

The largest reason reported was having a legacy PBX that is out of warranty, at 19.5%. An expiring service contract followed at 14.6%.

Other reasons included needing a system capable of scaling with the organization, dissatisfaction with technical support, paying too much for the existing solution and wanting to consolidate disparate systems into a cloud platform.

This is an important distinction.

Businesses don’t necessarily wake up one morning and decide they need “UCaaS.”

They discover that replacement parts are becoming difficult to obtain. Their service provider no longer supports the equipment. The company opens another location. Employees need to work remotely. An existing contract expires. Management wants better reporting. Or the organization simply realizes that keeping an aging system operational is becoming more trouble than replacing it.

The technology conversation follows the business problem.

That is how telecommunications decisions have worked for a long time, regardless of whether the eventual answer is another PBX, hosted VoIP, Microsoft Teams calling or a broader UCaaS platform.

Cloud Doesn’t Just Mean Replacing the Desk Phone

The term UCaaS can make a relatively straightforward concept sound more complicated than it needs to be.

Traditional unified communications attempted to bring technologies such as voice, video, instant messaging, file sharing and other communications tools together. Early UC environments were generally deployed on premises and could require significant investments in hardware, software and specialized personnel.

UCaaS moved that concept into a service delivered over an IP network by a third-party provider.

Voice remains a mission-critical part of these platforms, but today’s systems increasingly incorporate video, messaging, screen sharing, shared calendars, file sharing, analytics and integrations with CRM and other business applications.

That changes the phone-system conversation.

The question is no longer simply:

“Which phones should we buy?”

A better question is:

“How does our business actually communicate?”

For some companies, the answer may still revolve heavily around desk phones. For others, mobile applications, remote employees, call queues, SMS, video meetings and integrations may be equally important.

Neither approach is automatically right or wrong.

The system should follow the business.

Microsoft Teams Complicates the Decision

Microsoft Teams has become impossible to ignore when discussing modern business communications.

Millions of employees already use Teams for meetings, messaging and collaboration, which naturally leads businesses to ask whether Teams should also become their telephone system.

The answer isn’t always obvious.

The report notes that Microsoft had approximately 320 million active Teams users in 2024, but only about 20 million were PSTN-enabled.

Using Teams internally and using Teams as the organization’s connection to the public telephone network are two different things.

Businesses considering Teams for voice must evaluate licensing, PSTN connectivity, Direct Routing, carrier options, support and the telephone features employees actually require.

As AVANT’s report puts it, there is an entire ecosystem surrounding Teams voice. Organizations must determine whether their PSTN voice or PBX belongs inside Teams or whether another architecture makes more sense.

Dedicated UCaaS platforms remain significant for precisely this reason.

The report points to areas where specialized providers may offer different capabilities, including SMS, voice support, international coverage, fax, MMS and omnichannel communications.

Teams can be the right answer.

So can a dedicated UCaaS platform.

And sometimes the best solution combines the two.

AI Is Starting to Change the Business Phone Again

The next evolution is already happening.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming part of communications platforms rather than a completely separate technology.

The report identifies features including real-time call transcription and closed captioning, automated call summaries and highlights, sentiment analysis, AI-generated action items and personal-assistant capabilities.

These capabilities begin to change the value of a business telephone call.

Historically, much of the information contained in a phone conversation disappeared when someone hung up unless an employee manually documented it.

Modern platforms can potentially turn those conversations into searchable and actionable business information.

A sales conversation can generate a summary. A customer-service interaction can produce follow-up items. Calls can be transcribed. Managers can identify patterns across communications that previously existed only in individual conversations.

The telephone isn’t disappearing.

It’s becoming software.

Choosing a Provider May Be Harder Than Choosing the Technology

There is another consequence of having so many options: businesses have to determine which vendor actually fits their environment.

AVANT found that 57% of respondents in its Interactive Quick Assessment data were still learning about available UCaaS solutions, while another 31% were actively looking at UCaaS providers.

That’s a huge portion of prospective buyers who haven’t reached a final answer.

And that makes sense.

Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, Zoom, Dialpad, 8×8 and other platforms can overlap considerably while still differing in architecture, pricing, integrations, support and features.

Comparing feature sheets only gets you so far.

The more useful exercise is understanding the company’s actual requirements before selecting the platform.

How are incoming calls handled?

Which employees really need desk phones?

Are there analog devices that must remain operational?

Does the business need SMS?

What happens after hours?

Are employees working remotely?

Does the organization have multiple locations?

What happens if the internet connection at one location fails?

Which numbers need to be ported?

What integrations matter?

Who is responsible for support when something doesn’t work?

Those questions tend to expose differences between solutions much faster than comparing a hundred features most employees will never use.

Test Before You Migrate

One of the strongest recommendations in the report is also one of the most practical: test the system before committing the entire organization.

AVANT recommends conducting a proof-of-concept evaluation before signing a UCaaS purchase order. Because cloud platforms don’t require the same hardware deployment as traditional on-premises systems, businesses can test potential solutions much more easily than they could in the past.

The report recommends gathering requirements from employees across the organization, creating a scorecard and evaluating areas such as features, collaboration, ease of use, administration and mobile applications. When comparing multiple platforms, the same users and success criteria should be used whenever possible.

That’s good advice for businesses of almost any size.

Don’t migrate because somebody delivered a good demonstration.

Find out how the system behaves in your environment.

The Trusted Advisor Still Has a Place

Perhaps the most important development in telecommunications isn’t technological at all.

More choices have created a greater need for someone who understands how those choices fit together.

The report describes Trusted Advisors, consultants, agents and resellers as independent organizations that help businesses evaluate solutions according to their requirements, budgets and existing infrastructure. Their involvement can continue beyond the sale into deployment, optimization, support and training.

That role becomes particularly valuable during the transition between generations of telecommunications.

A business may have an old PBX today, SIP trunks somewhere else, analog lines serving elevators or alarms, Teams on every employee’s computer and a new UCaaS platform being considered for the next location.

Real-world telecom isn’t always clean.

Sometimes the job isn’t ripping everything out and starting over.

It’s understanding what the business has, determining what still serves a purpose, identifying what should change and building a migration path that doesn’t disrupt operations.

Don’t Replace a Phone System Just Because It’s Old

There is no prize for being the first company to eliminate every piece of legacy telecommunications equipment.

If an existing system works, remains supportable and meets the company’s requirements, there may be perfectly legitimate reasons to keep it operating.

But businesses should understand where that system sits in its lifecycle.

Parts availability, carrier changes, support availability, network requirements, remote-work needs, contract expiration and organizational growth can eventually turn a reliable old PBX into an operational liability.

The important thing is to make that transition deliberately rather than waiting until a failure forces the decision.

At Kommvia, we work with businesses across Indiana and the Chicago area to evaluate existing phone systems, legacy and analog telecommunications, VoIP and UCaaS options, network infrastructure and the physical cabling underneath it all.

Sometimes the answer is migration.

Sometimes it’s integration.

Sometimes it’s keeping an existing system running while developing a plan for what comes next.

The goal isn’t to put every business in the cloud. It’s to put every business on the communications system that actually fits the way it operates.

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