The cloud-first debate in contact center technology has been playing out for years.
But while industry figures argue about the merits of on-premise versus cloud, enterprises are quietly making their decisions – and the commercial race to capture their business is already well underway.
Millions of seats are in motion. The vendors best positioned to absorb them are spending heavily to make sure those seats land on their platforms.
Avaya CEO Patrick Dennis reignited the debate back in March when he challenged what he called an industry narrative that had been “shoved down our throats” for years.
“While the world rushed toward multi-tenant CCaaS, a massive number of enterprise seats stayed put,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
“Because performance guardrails, latency, and proprietary data privacy aren’t ‘legacy concerns’ — they’re competitive moats.”
Dennis’s argument is clearly valid. However, for the contact center operators sitting on aging Avaya or Mitel infrastructure right now, the philosophical debate is largely beside the point.
The more pressing issue is that their vendor is effectively pushing them out the door, and every major CCaaS provider in the market is waiting to catch them.
A Customer Base Under Pressure
The immediate catalyst for much of the current migration activity is Avaya itself.
In February 2025, the vendor announced that its Experience Platform (AXP) Public Cloud would enforce a monthly minimum of 200 agent seats, effective June 30, 2025.
This meant that the mid-market and smaller contact center operators sitting below that threshold were forced to find an alternative.
Avaya has since launched its Infinity platform, a hybrid architecture combining on-premises and cloud workflows that is squarely aimed at large enterprise and public sector customers who want modernization without the disruption of a full rip-and-replace.
Mitel’s situation has played out differently but produced similar anxiety among its customer base.
The vendor counts over 70 million users across more than 100 countries, but ownership changes and uncertainty over its AI roadmap could well have prompted some of those organizations to at least start looking around.
RingCentral has held a migration partnership with Mitel since 2021, giving it a head start in capturing that cohort. But the arrangement is no longer exclusive, which has opened the door to other bidders.
Who’s Picking Up the Pieces
Of the vendors actively competing for this business, Genesys arguably has the most visible momentum.
The company became the first CCaaS provider to cross $2.1 billion in annual recurring revenue for its Genesys Cloud platform, and by early 2026, that figure had risen to nearly $2.5 billion – on the back of 35% year-over-year cloud revenue growth.
In a single quarter, Genesys secured 50 CCaaS deals worth seven figures each.
NiCE is competing hard at the enterprise end of the market, with the vendor positioning its CXone platform as the main choice for large, complex contact center environments.
Its acquisition of Cognigy has added significant AI depth at a point when prospects aren’t just evaluating the migration itself but what their AI story looks like once they’ve made it.
Cisco, on the other hand, is playing a longer game. In a blog post last year, Oliver Tuszik, EVP of Global Sales and Chief Sales Officer at Cisco, reaffirmed the company’s commitment to on-premise technologies – a message that arguably speaks directly to Avaya and Mitel customers uncertain about their next move.
As CX Today noted at the time, Cisco is one of the few vendors able to compete credibly across all deployment models simultaneously.”
RingCentral’s Mitel partnership history gives it structural advantages others don’t have.
What began as a voluntary migration pathway in 2021 has since become an active transition program, with RingCentral taking over all technical support for Mitel cloud customers in August 2024. By September 2025, users who hadn’t already moved to an alternative were being auto-ported to RingCentral.
For a vendor competing for displaced on-premise customers, that kind of embedded pipeline is difficult to replicate.
8×8 is also competing directly for this cohort, having built out a dedicated Mitel migration play, including device compatibility and a specific go-to-market pitch for customers looking to move off on-premise infrastructure without replacing their existing hardware.
Migration Reality
None of this is straightforward, and the vendor pitches rarely dwell on the hard parts.
Legacy contact center deployments – especially those built up and customized over years – carry integration complexity that doesn’t disappear when a new contract is signed.
Custom routing logic, third-party integrations, workforce management connections, and bespoke reporting environments all have to be recreated or replaced.
For a 24/7 contact center operation, cutover risk is a genuine concern.
Flexera’s State of the Cloud 2026 report found that 73% of enterprises have now adopted hybrid cloud strategies.
That figure reveals that most operators aren’t making a clean break. They’re choosing how much to move, on what timeline, and what to keep running on-premise in the meantime.
According to Metrigy, the UCaaS market grew 6.1% in 2025 as businesses continued migrating from on-premises solutions.
This steady growth suggests that the most complex environments are taking the longest, and those are exactly the accounts every major CCaaS vendor is chasing hardest.
The Verdict
The irony of Dennis’s hybrid argument is that most of the major CCaaS vendors have quietly come around to the same position.
Full cloud, hybrid, and managed on-premise are all considered legitimate deployment models in 2026. The vendors with the broadest range of options across those models are arguably best placed to absorb wherever the displaced customer base lands.
Genesys’s ARR figures suggest it is currently winning the largest share of that race. But with Cisco, NICE, RingCentral, and 8×8 all competing for the same cohort, the outcome is far from settled.
For contact center operators still sitting on aging Avaya or Mitel infrastructure, the longer they delay, the less leverage they will have when the time comes to make the move.
