Twenty-six years ago, Salesforce launched one of the most famous campaigns in tech history. Their message was simple and bold: “No Software.”
The promise was that the future belonged to the cloud—no more servers to manage, no more hardware to maintain, no more costly on-premise systems to babysit. It was a clean break from the old world.
That was 2000. Just over a quarter century later, many enterprises are still waiting to fully arrive in that future.
The cloud transformation story isn’t wrong; it’s just incomplete. The reality on the ground is more complicated, more nuanced, and far more interesting than the simple “everything is moving to the cloud” narrative. Data from the AVOXI/Metrigy State of International Voice for the Contact Center report shows that most enterprises aren’t living in either the old world or the new one. They’re living in both at the same time.
What Companies Are Actually Doing
Ask most vendors and analysts where the enterprise market is headed, and you’ll hear one word: cloud. That’s true. But ask where enterprises are right now, and the picture looks very different.
When it comes to contact center software (CCaaS), nearly half of organizations, about 49%, are running a hybrid model that blends on-premises systems with cloud-based capabilities. Only 35% are fully cloud-deployed. On the unified communications (UCaaS) side, the numbers tell the same story: nearly half use a hybrid UC model, while two-thirds still maintain some level of on-premises infrastructure.
That pattern is not a coincidence. Across both CCaaS and UCaaS, hybrid is the dominant deployment model. And it isn’t going away anytime soon.
Why Companies Are Moving to Cloud—and Why Some Are Staying Put
There’s a strong gravitational pull toward the cloud. According to separate Metrigy research, 70% of companies plan to move fully to cloud-based systems by 2028. The reasons are well-documented: cloud infrastructure offers better reliability, greater visibility into call performance, lower maintenance overhead, and the flexibility needed to support AI and other emerging technologies.
But a meaningful portion of the market isn’t in a hurry. About 22% say they’ll move “later than 2028 or never,” though only 7.5% say they’ll never move at all. These figures come from independent Metrigy research cited by Metrigy CEO Robin Gareiss during AVOXI’s webinar series. For most of these organizations, the hesitation isn’t stubbornness; it’s complexity.
“A lot of what we see… is that there are people who have been there for a long time and they feel that there’s a lot of customization and there’s no way they can move it to the cloud… typically the trigger is a new leader comes in and says, yes, we can move this to the cloud.”
— Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst, Metrigy
This is a pattern worth paying attention to. Many enterprises have spent years—sometimes decades—building customized voice workflows on top of on-prem systems. The perceived risk of moving those customizations to the cloud feels enormous, especially when the people closest to the system are the ones who built it. The shift often happens when new leadership arrives with fresh eyes and a willingness to challenge the assumption that migration is impossible.
The Other Hybrid: Multiple Cloud Platforms
Here’s something the “cloud vs. on-prem” framing misses entirely: many enterprises that are “in the cloud” are actually running multiple clouds at the same time. “Hybrid” doesn’t just mean one foot in the old world and one foot in the new one. For a growing number of organizations, it means operating across several cloud platforms simultaneously.
A company might run Genesys for its contact center, Microsoft Teams for internal communications, and a separate global voice provider for international calling. These systems don’t automatically talk to each other. Managing voice across multiple cloud platforms adds its own layer of complexity that must (and can be) addressed.
The research confirms this reality: 72% of organizations use the same provider for both UCaaS and CCaaS in an effort to simplify integration. But voice services are still sourced from a mix of UCaaS providers, telecom carriers, and specialty voice partners. Multi-platform is the norm, not the exception.
What This Means for Voice Infrastructure
All of this leads to a critical question that doesn’t get asked often enough: what happens to your voice infrastructure when your deployment model is in flux?
Voice can’t afford to wait for your migration plan to finish. Customers are calling right now; from Tokyo, from São Paulo, from Lagos. Every call that drops or connects poorly is a customer experience problem, regardless of whether your underlying infrastructure happens to be in the middle of a transition.
The problem with platform-locked voice is that it doesn’t account for this reality. When your voice services are bundled directly into your CCaaS or UCaaS platform, you lose flexibility at exactly the moment you need it most. Changing platforms means changing voice. Expanding to a new region means checking whether your platform supports it. Switching providers means starting your number porting process from scratch.
For enterprises managing voice across 30, 50, or 100+ countries, that rigidity has real costs.
AVOXI’s Approach: Infrastructure That Works Everywhere
The way AVOXI thinks about this problem starts with a simple premise: your voice infrastructure should work regardless of where you are in your deployment journey. Whether you’re fully cloud, fully on-prem, or somewhere in between, voice should be a constant, not another variable to manage.
That means integrating with both on-premises systems and cloud platforms without requiring you to change your voice setup when your underlying infrastructure changes. It means supporting hybrid environments natively, not as an afterthought. And it means giving global enterprises the coverage and local number access they need to operate across every region they serve.
The flexibility advantage shows up in three specific ways. First, enterprises can migrate to the cloud on their own timeline without being forced to change their voice provider during the transition. Second, they can change CCaaS or UCaaS platforms without rebuilding their voice infrastructure from scratch. Third, they can expand globally with the control and visibility they need to manage performance across markets.
That last point matters more than it might seem. The research found that 78% of enterprises report significant challenges getting the geographic coverage they need. When your voice is decoupled from your platform, expanding to a new country becomes a voice infrastructure decision, not a platform limitation.
The Bottom Line
Salesforce’s “No Software” campaign was right about the direction. It just underestimated how long the journey would take for the enterprises running the world’s most complex communication systems.
The enterprises that come out ahead won’t be the ones that moved to the cloud the fastest. They’ll be the ones who built voice infrastructure flexible enough to support wherever they are right now, and wherever they’re going next.
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