San Joaquin supervisors approve cloud telephony switch, citing $850,000 annual savings

The San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors on Feb. 11 unanimously approved a plan to replace the county
esk‑phone and call‑center infrastructure with Microsoft Teams Voice and upgraded Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

Mark Thomas, director of the county
epartment of Information Systems, told the board the county
urrently operates multiple on‑premises Cisco Communications Manager instances and AT&T Centrix analog lines that are reaching end‑of‑support and face long‑term reliability risks. "Cisco has decided that it no longer wants to support on premise PBXs," Thomas said during the briefing. He told supervisors Microsoft Teams Voice will allow employees to use their Teams client or upgraded desk phones as telephones, enable a mobile Teams app, and replace fragile copper trunks with fiber‑based, redundant services.

Thomas said the change will improve system availability, reduce single points of failure and produce estimated recurring savings of about $850,000 per year in vendor invoices. He also said Microsoft 365 licensing will let the county consolidate other software and save further costs.

Supervisors focused questions on emergency communications and rural connectivity. Thomas said the county will build redundancy and that critical "red phones" and emergency lines will continue to operate and be power‑backed; fiber and multiple routes will be used to avoid single‑point copper outages. "This system will, in aggregate, be much more highly available than our current phone system," he said.

The board approved the project and the associated budget and contracting authorization by roll call vote, 5–0. County staff will proceed with licensing upgrades, equipment conversion and a phased rollout coordinated with departments to minimize service disruption.

The vote follows a staff recommendation that the county move from multiple on‑site PBX systems to a cloud‑hosted voice service, and includes provisions for maintaining power‑backed emergency circuits and layered redundancy for critical county facilities.

The county clerk recorded the vote as unanimous; the board noted a follow‑up implementation plan will return to the board if supplemental budget authority is later required.

The decision leaves in place responsibilities to report progress publicly and to ensure rural residents relying on carrier‑of‑last‑resort copper lines continue to have access to emergency services while migration proceeds.