Legacy Platform Retirement
What Is Legacy Platform Retirement?
Legacy platform retirement is the process of decommissioning a voice platform after its customers have moved to a new one. Once the platform has been fully decommissioned and the associated obligations have ended, applicable licensing, hardware, support and maintenance costs can stop.
What has to happen before a platform can be retired?
Every customer has been migrated and verified on the destination platform
Numbers have been re-routed or ported, and no live traffic still reaches the legacy platform
Billing records and related workflows have been updated for each migrated customer
Historical call detail records and other required data are retained or archived
Legacy integrations with billing, provisioning and operational systems have been transitioned, replaced or disconnected as required
Contracts, licensing and support obligations have been reviewed
Migrated customers are removed from the legacy environment when authorized by the provider
The last steps of a migration often decide when retirement can happen. In Vox Matic's Metaswitch to NetSapiens process, the Complete step covers billing updates, removing migrated customers from the applicable Metaswitch environment when authorized by the provider, and handoff to operational teams.
Why does the timing of retirement matter?
While two platforms run in parallel, a provider may carry two sets of licensing, support, integrations and operational knowledge. The sooner the remaining customers move, the sooner applicable legacy costs can end. Reducing repetitive migration work can help shorten the transition and allow applicable legacy expenses to be retired sooner.
Retirement vs. end of life
End of life | Platform retirement | |
|---|---|---|
Whose decision | The vendor's | The service provider's |
What it means | The vendor announces that the sale, maintenance or support of a product or release will be reduced or ended according to a defined lifecycle schedule | The provider stops running the platform for its customers |
Timing | Set by the vendor's announcement | Set by the provider's migration plan |
A vendor may issue end-of-sale, end-of-maintenance or end-of-support notices for individual products or releases without retiring the entire platform family. Providers should consult the vendor's current lifecycle documentation when planning a migration.
For the financial side of the decision, see the business case for retiring legacy telecom platforms and The Cost of Doing Nothing Is Rising.
Frequently asked questions
When can we turn off the legacy platform?
After the final wave has been verified, no live traffic reaches the platform, required data has been retained and contracts and support obligations have been reviewed.
Does migrating automatically reduce costs?
Not on its own. Applicable legacy costs end once the platform has been fully decommissioned and the associated obligations have ended, which is why planning retirement alongside the migration matters.
What happens to historical call records?
That depends on billing, regulatory and contractual requirements. Historical CDRs are often kept in the billing system or archived separately, and the decision should be made before the platform is retired.
Related terms
Retire legacy platforms sooner
Request a Migration Assessment to review your platforms, timeline and migration objectives.
NetSapiens is a trademark of Crexendo, Inc. Metaswitch and BroadWorks are trademarks of their respective owners. Otto™ and Forge™ are trademarks of Vox Matic. Vox Matic is an independent migration services provider. References to third-party products are for identification and interoperability purposes only and do not imply endorsement, except where an authorized partnership is expressly identified.