Transitioning Aerospace Communications

Situation

A global aerospace organization with tens of thousands of employees across Canada and Europe, had undergone multiple large-scale organizational changes, including cloud migrations, business mergers, and later separations. Their communications environment relied heavily on Cisco-based telephony, which introduced significant cost, operational complexity, and management overhead. With Microsoft 365 already in place, the client saw an opportunity to simplify and modernize their communications stack.

Task

Red X Carbon was engaged to design and execute the transition from Cisco telephony to Microsoft Teams Telephony for a large, regulated aerospace environment. The objective was to reduce complexity and cost, maintain business continuity, and support a wide range of mission-critical devices—including shop-floor phones, security turnstiles, and emergency systems—without compromising safety or compliance.

Action

Red X Carbon acted as a core architecture and program leadership partner, designing the telephony migration while Cisco Systems were gradually decommissioned. The team addressed complex requirements such as:

• Supporting thousands of heterogeneous devices beyond standard user endpoints.

• Ensuring emergency and security call handling in regulated environments.

• Integrating third-party solutions for call recording and attendant consoles where Microsoft Teams capabilities were insufficient at the time.

• Stepping in mid-project to course-correct deployment challenges, extend timelines responsibly, and stabilize delivery.

Red X Carbon leveraged a flexible bench of subject-matter experts across cloud architecture, security, identity, and device management, enabling rapid problem resolution across interconnected systems.

Result

The client successfully transitioned a large portion of its workforce from Cisco to Microsoft Teams Telephony, consolidating communications into a single, familiar platform. The solution reduced technology duplication, improved user experience, and positioned the environment for long-term manageability by incumbent services teams. The client remained highly satisfied and continues to engage Red X Carbon for ongoing and future initiatives.

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