Updated: Feb 10, 2026
For years, large IT and IT-enabled services firms treated enterprise telephony as solved infrastructure. Once deployed, PBXs and SIP trunks faded into the background, maintained by telecom teams and revisited only during contract renewals.
That operating assumption has broken.
Not because legacy telephony stopped working, but because the way IT/ITeS firms scale, deliver, and govern work has changed faster than voice architectures were designed to support.
What we are seeing now is not a cosmetic shift to the cloud. It is a structural realignment of how voice fits into large, distributed service organisations.
For a CIO or CTO, scale in an IT/ITeS firm is no longer a function of total headcount. It is defined by volatility. Teams ramp up and down around client programmes. New delivery centres open to serve specific geographies or cost structures. Support, presales, and escalation teams operate across time zones, often outside the physical footprint of the delivery organisation.
Traditional telephony was built for static environments. Capacity planning assumed predictable growth tied to buildings and circuits. In contrast, IT/ITeS firms now need voice systems that expand, contract, and reconfigure without forcing infrastructure redesign every quarter.
Cloud telephony addresses this mismatch by separating voice capacity from physical sites. Scaling voice becomes an operational decision rather than a capital planning exercise.
Large IT/ITeS firms manage some of the most fluid talent models in enterprise. Employees move between accounts, cities, and roles. Contractors and project-based teams join and exit at pace. Hybrid and remote work is not an exception.
Legacy telephony struggles under this fluidity. Extensions, routing logic, and access controls remain tied to locations rather than roles. Each move introduces friction, manual work, and the risk of configuration drift.
Cloud telephony aligns voice identity to the user rather than the desk. Policies follow people across locations, devices, and assignments. For leadership teams, this reduces operational drag while improving control over who can communicate, how, and under what conditions.
IT/ITeS firms were early adopters of modern collaboration platforms. Video meetings, messaging, and shared workspaces became core to delivery and client engagement.
Voice, however, often remained outside this stack. It continued to live in telecom silos with separate administration, monitoring, and governance.
This separation became costly. Users moved between tools. IT teams debugged incidents across disconnected systems. Governance policies applied unevenly across communication channels.
Cloud telephony pulls voice into the same control plane as collaboration. For large service organisations, this is less about feature parity and more about operational coherence. Communication becomes governable as a single system rather than a collection of exceptions.
Many IT/ITeS firms serve clients in regulated sectors such as BFSI, healthcare, and public services. Audit scrutiny has expanded steadily from applications to infrastructure and now to communication systems.
Voice platforms are increasingly reviewed for access control, call handling policies, data governance, and traceability. Legacy telephony, fragmented across sites and vendors, makes this difficult to demonstrate with confidence.
Cloud telephony centralises policy definition and audit visibility. Changes are logged. Access is controlled consistently. Routing behaviour can be explained without reconstructing site-specific configurations. For C-suite leaders, this is not a compliance upgrade. It is risk reduction in client-facing operations.
Large IT/ITeS firms operate across mature hubs such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, and NCR, alongside emerging delivery locations. Expansion decisions are often driven by talent availability rather than telecom readiness.
Traditional telephony replicates complexity at every site. Local gateways, vendor coordination, and troubleshooting multiply as the footprint grows. Over time, this becomes a structural cost centre.
Cloud telephony standardises the experience across locations. While local connectivity remains important, complexity shifts away from individual sites and into centrally managed platforms. The organisation gains predictability as it grows.
Perhaps the most important shift is conceptual. For large IT/ITeS firms, voice is no longer a background utility. It directly shapes client experience, support responsiveness, and internal coordination.
Cloud telephony supports this shift by making voice programmable, observable, and governable at scale. Leadership teams gain visibility into how communication actually flows across the organisation.
This enables informed decisions around staffing models, support structures, and client engagement patterns that were previously hidden behind telecom abstractions.
Consider a mid-sized IT services firm headquartered in Bengaluru, with delivery centres in Hyderabad and a newer facility in Coimbatore. The firm supports multiple overseas clients with 24x7 application support and customer-facing escalation desks.
Its collaboration stack was modern and cloud-based. Voice was not. Each site ran its own telephony setup, procured at different points in time, with different vendors and routing logic. As headcount grew unevenly across centres, the firm found itself constantly resizing trunks, reassigning numbers, and troubleshooting routing behaviour that varied by location.
The breaking point did not come from call quality complaints. It came during a client audit. The firm was asked to demonstrate how escalation calls were routed, who could access call records, and how changes were governed across locations. Producing a consistent answer required manual coordination across sites and vendors.
The firm moved to a cloud telephony model to centralise control. User identities were decoupled from physical desks. Routing policies were standardised across locations. Audit visibility improved because governance moved into a single administrative layer.
What changed was not the volume of calls. What changed was the firm’s ability to explain, govern, and adapt its communication model as delivery centres evolved.
For leadership teams, the value of cloud telephony becomes clear when day-to-day governance changes in measurable ways. In large IT/ITeS environments, moving voice into a cloud-governed model typically results in the following shifts:
What disappears is as important as what appears. Local PBX configurations, site-by-site variance, and undocumented routing behaviour gradually fall away. Voice stops behaving like infrastructure and starts behaving like a governed enterprise service.
The move to cloud telephony is rarely driven by dissatisfaction with call quality. It is driven by questions that legacy systems struggle to answer.
For many large IT/ITeS firms, the answer increasingly points in one direction.
Large IT/ITeS firms are switching to cloud telephony because the cost of standing still has risen. When voice remains tied to physical sites and legacy operating assumptions, it becomes a constraint on scale, governance, and client confidence. When voice operates as part of the enterprise collaboration stack, it becomes an enabler.
The shift is not about technology modernisation alone. It is about aligning communication systems with how large service organisations actually operate today.
This checklist reflects the questions senior IT leaders typically ask when evaluating whether cloud telephony aligns with their operating model.
If these questions can be answered with confidence, cloud telephony moves from an infrastructure upgrade to an operating model decision.
For large IT/ITeS organisations, the shift to cloud telephony is less about replacing a system and more about choosing how communication is governed at scale.
Proactive Data Systems works with enterprise IT leaders to design, deploy, and govern cloud telephony environments that align with complex operating models, multi-city delivery footprints, and audit expectations. Our focus is not on tools alone, but on execution discipline, governance clarity, and predictable outcomes.
If you are evaluating cloud telephony as part of a broader collaboration or operating model transformation, a structured discussion grounded in your delivery footprint, governance needs, and growth plans is the right place to start.
