For many service providers, the communications market has reached an inflection point.
Recent announcements that pricing for maintenance and support contracts are materially increasing on legacy voice infrastructure have fundamentally changed the economics of staying put. What was once a manageable operating expense has become a significant line item that deserves executive attention.
As a result, service providers now face three choices:
Option 1: Pay the Increase and Stay Put
The easiest path is often to do nothing.
Pay the higher maintenance costs, continue operating the existing platform, and postpone a larger decision until another day.
The problem? You’re paying more to maintain a platform that is receiving less investment in innovation and falling further behind market expectations. Business customers expectations are changing. They expect integrated collaboration, mobility, AI-powered capabilities, business texting, Microsoft Teams integration, and modern contact center functionality.
Paying so much more for yesterday’s technology isn’t a growth strategy – its kicking the can down the road while adding a headwind to your business.
Option 2: Move to Your Vendor’s New Program
The vendors who are increasing prices are also encouraging service to transition to alternative cloud-based platforms. But before making the move, it’s important to look beyond the vision and evaluate the practical realities of what will actually be delivered.
A significant portion of today’s communications innovation is centered around AI. Every provider is talking about AI-powered customer experiences, intelligent automation, conversational analytics, agent assistance, virtual receptionists, workflow orchestration, and customer engagement.
The question isn’t whether AI is important.
The question is how those capabilities actually get delivered.
If your vendor is using a lot of big buzzwords rather than sharing real capabilities that can help your business, it’s probably more sizzle than steak. While orchestration layers and communication fabric may sound compelling, make sure they don’t depend on integrating multiple third-party AI vendors and applications into a common framework to receive the functionality as promised.
For service providers, this raises important considerations:
- Who is responsible for selecting, integrating, and managing those third-party solutions?
- How consistent will the customer experience be across multiple vendors?
- How quickly can new capabilities be brought to market?
- How much operational complexity is being introduced into your business?
Most service providers aren’t looking to become systems integrators for AI.
They’re looking for proven solutions they can sell today.
Solutions that are already integrated, supported, priced, provisioned, and ready to deploy.
As AI becomes a critical buying criterion, success will increasingly depend on how quickly providers can bring practical capabilities to market, not how many future integrations appear on a roadmap.
Option 3: Modernize on Your Terms
The third option is to use this moment as an opportunity to move to a modern cloud communications platform built specifically for service providers.
Intermedia’s Ascend platform combines enterprise voice, business messaging, video meetings, contact center, Microsoft Teams integration, archiving, analytics, and AI-powered capabilities in a single platform. Service providers maintain ownership of their customers, control their branding, and retain pricing flexibility. AI capabilities are built directly into the platform, including meeting recaps, call insights, AI-powered agent assistance, supervisor tools, intent routing, and virtual receptionists.
More importantly, providers gain access to a platform that continues to evolve rather than one focused on maintaining legacy infrastructure or integrating with 3rd party vendors.
The Biggest Objection: Migration
Most service providers understand the need to modernize.
The challenge isn’t deciding whether to move.
It’s figuring out how.
Large-scale migrations are expensive, resource-intensive, and often viewed as high risk. That’s why many providers continue operating aging platforms long after they’ve become strategically obsolete.
That’s where Intermedia’s Service Transition Enablement Program (STEP) changes the equation.
STEP is a comprehensive migration-as-a-service program that includes automated migration tools, dedicated migration specialists, project management resources, and go-to-market support—all provided at no cost. Intermedia’s team assists with the actual migration process, dramatically reducing the burden on internal engineering and operations teams.
The Economics Matter
A modernization project only works if the numbers work.
That’s why Intermedia’s goal is straightforward: migrate your user base at no cost while working to ensure your ongoing platform costs are equivalent to your current environment. At the same time, you gain a modern communications platform, reduced infrastructure burden, and a stronger competitive position in the market.
A steep hike in maintenance pricing may feel like an unwelcome surprise.
But it also creates an opportunity.
An opportunity to modernize.
An opportunity to improve competitiveness.
And an opportunity to build a communications business designed for the next decade—not the last one.
The question isn’t whether change is coming.
The question is whether you’ll be paying more to preserve the past or investing in the future.
Brian Gregory
Brian Gregory is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia Communications. He has responsibility for guiding Intermedia’s service provider marketing initiatives, including product strategy, content development, business analytics, and go-to-market execution. Brian has held various roles in marketing and product management at communication service providers and technology concerns, including Ribbon, Metaswitch, and Sprint.
June 18, 2026
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