There are quite a few debates about where a business Unified Communication solution should physically be located.  Should it be customer premise equipment (CPE) or should it be in the cloud? 

But what is right for your neighbor might not necessarily be right for you.  You might have sunk costs.  You might have different needs or even skillsets in the company.  So it is not a binary answer if you already have some form of real time business communication in place.  If you are happy with your PBX or voice mail or IVR for instance, and it’s not difficult to maintain it, and the maintenance costs are small, why move that to the cloud?  It works, you paid for it and it does what you need it to do.   Maybe you are happy with all of that, but the original company either doesn’t support it anymore or is out of business, and you are concerned about keeping your business running in case the equipment decides to fall over, so you have decided you need to do something about it.  You might therefore need new equipment, either in the form of CPE or cloud.

In other words, it’s not binary.  Many businesses can’t simply stand still and are taking a hybrid approach to get new functionality in.  Keep what is already there if it’s working fine, and then migrate new or older functions that might be hard to now maintain to the cloud.  For instance, your 10 year old on premises PBX or fax solution may be getting less use, and you may not even be able to maintain it if something went wrong with it.  Those could be a great function to move to the cloud. 

Or maybe you want to give your business instance messaging and presence.  Move that to the cloud as you implement it.   Or you may have a great need for video IVR.  Start that in the cloud.

If your business is larger and you have multiple locations, there are also geographic reasons to not do everything the same.  Perhaps it makes sense to do small offices in the cloud especially if there are no IT resources at that location. 

In other words, do what you’ve always done.  Make it a business decision.  Cloud is getting a lot of press these days and it’s a great way to go, but understand the costs first and your future business needs before making any decisions.   And if they work for you, put a migration plan in place and go for it.