When the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston needed to retire a decades-old PBX, they turned to Abitronix and SIPPIO to migrate 650 users to Microsoft Teams Phone and discovered the value of a vendor that actually picks up the phone.
“The SIPPIO team has been excellent. They have the expertise to help an organization get from on-prem to the cloud, they shepherd you along the way, and you get white-glove treatment post go-live. That alone is reason enough to recommend them.” — Jonathan Delgaizo, IT Leadership, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Challenge
Few institutions wear their history quite like the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Founded in 1870 and home to nearly 500,000 works of art, the MFA welcomes more than a million visitors a year and depends on its phone system far more than most modern offices.
While internal communication has shifted toward Microsoft Teams chat and video since the pandemic, the museum’s phone lines remain the front door for the public. Visitor Services, the membership team, the operators’ room — all rely on traditional voice to help guests purchase tickets, plan visits, and become members.
Behind the scenes, however, that mission-critical voice infrastructure was running on borrowed time. The MFA’s legacy on-premises PBX had been upgraded over the years, but it carried the weight of an older era: physical servers in a VMware environment, redundant pairs to maintain uptime, multiple PRI circuits to manage, and constant administrative overhead — license counts to track, workstations to provision, leavers to deprovision.
The system was reliable. But the writing was on the wall.
When the MFA’s PBX vendor announced it would no longer support its on-premises product line — pushing customers either to its own cloud platform or out the door — Jonathan Delgaizo and his team faced a decision. They could take the path of least resistance and follow the vendor into a proprietary cloud. Or they could use the moment to do something smarter.
They chose smarter.
The Decision: Unify on Microsoft, Modernize the Stack
The MFA was already running Microsoft 365 A5 licenses — meaning Teams Phone capability was, in effect, already paid for. Consolidating voice into the same platform staff used every day for chat, meetings, and email made obvious sense.
“We figured, with the A5 licenses we already get Teams and Teams Phone. Let’s make it more of a unified platform.” — Jonathan Delgaizo
The question wasn’t whether to move to Teams. It was who to trust to get them there.
That’s where Abitronix entered the picture. As a long-standing technology advisor with deep expertise in unified communications, Abitronix introduced the MFA’s network engineers — Sergey and Eric, both veteran IT professionals — to SIPPIO.
The demo landed quickly. SIPPIO’s status as a Microsoft-certified Operator Connect provider, its 100% Azure-native architecture, and the speed at which users could be activated all stood out. Sergey and Eric came back to Jonathan with a clear recommendation.
“Sergey and Eric did the legwork. SIPPIO gave them a really good presentation, the pricing model worked, and when I did my own homework, SIPPIO kept popping up at the top of the list — one of the premier platforms to use with Teams Phone. So we said, let’s pilot with the IT department.” — Jonathan Delgaizo
The Rollout: Eight-Month Pilot, Phased Migration, Zero Drama
The MFA’s deployment was deliberately untraditional. Rather than a big-bang cutover, the team ran an eight-month pilot inside the IT department before extending Teams Phone to the wider organization. This let gave staff confidence that the platform was battle-tested by the time it reached them.
When it came time to scale, Jonathan ported numbers in waves of 80 to 100 every three weeks — coordinating with SIPPIO, who in turn worked the back-end process with the losing carrier. Across the project, around 500 phone numbers were ported and 650 users moved to Teams Phone, all in the United States.
Throughout, the SIPPIO team — Manny on the account side, Trish and Rob on deployment — were a constant presence.
“They were extremely responsive. Timely. They really kind of held my hand and gave white-glove treatment throughout the whole process. Anytime I reached out — even non-emergencies — they got back to me right away. When something felt more urgent, they were there immediately.” — Jonathan Delgaizo
Internal adoption was, in Jonathan’s words, “a non-event.” Staff who wanted physical handsets were offered certified Microsoft Teams desk phones — but only about 20% requested one. The rest were perfectly happy taking calls from their laptops and headsets.
The “Aha” Moment: An Outage That Said It All
Sometimes the best validation of a new platform is what happens when the old one fails.
During the IT pilot phase, a major carrier outage hit the northeastern United States. The MFA’s PRI circuits went down with it, and the museum’s main number was effectively unreachable for the better part of a day and a half — anyone calling in heard a fast busy signal.
Inside IT, however, the phones kept ringing.
“Our PBX was down for about a day and a half, but the IT department’s phones were fine because we were on Teams phones with SIPPIO and our internet connection. I remember thinking, ‘I really look forward to the day we get our main number migrated over.'” — Jonathan Delgaizo
That moment crystallized what the migration was really about: resilience that doesn’t depend on a single carrier’s copper.
The Results
Today, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is running on Microsoft Teams Phone with SIPPIO providing voice connectivity through Operator Connect, complemented by a contact center solution for high-volume teams like Visitor Services.
The benefits are showing up across multiple dimensions:
- Architectural resilience. Voice is no longer tied to a single PRI circuit and a stack of on-prem servers. Calls ride the museum’s internet connection through SIPPIO’s Azure-native platform, with redundancy built into the cloud rather than the data closet.
- A unified Microsoft experience. Staff use one platform — Teams — for chat, meetings, video, and voice. Provisioning happens in the same admin surface that IT already uses for everything else.
- Cost efficiency. Even before retiring the PRI circuits, the combined annual cost of SIPPIO and the contact center solution comes in slightly under what the MFA was paying for its on-prem PBX SLA alone. Once the legacy circuits are decommissioned, savings will increase further.
- Smooth user adoption. With minimal change management drama and only ~20% of users opting for physical handsets, the rollout freed IT to focus on higher-value work rather than firefighting.
- A trusted partner ecosystem. Working with Abitronix as the trusted advisor and SIPPIO as the platform, the MFA had named, accountable contacts at every step — not a faceless ticket queue.
Why It Worked: People as Much as Platform
Ask Jonathan what made the difference, and the answer keeps coming back to the team.
“Manny is just insanely, incredibly responsive. The whole team — Trish, Rob — they’ve been excellent, all the way through.” — Jonathan Delgaizo
It’s a theme that comes up again and again from SIPPIO customers and partners alike: a platform built on Azure-native architecture is table stakes. What sets SIPPIO apart is the human layer wrapped around it.
For an institution like the MFA — where stewardship, care, and continuity matter more than the latest gadget — that combination was exactly what the moment called for.
Looking Ahead
With the migration substantially complete, Jonathan’s team is now working through the final phase: decommissioning the legacy PBX servers and cutting the remaining PRI circuits. Once that’s done, the MFA’s voice infrastructure will be entirely cloud-based — modern, resilient, and ready for whatever comes next.
For other organizations still tethered to legacy PBX systems, Jonathan has a clear answer.
“Would I recommend it? Absolutely. SIPPIO has the expertise to shepherd you from on-prem to the cloud, and the post-go-live support is white-glove. They have it all.” — Jonathan Delgaizo
About the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Founded in 1870, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world, housing nearly 500,000 works of art spanning ancient to contemporary. Each year the MFA welcomes more than a million visitors and serves a global community of members, scholars, students, and art lovers.
About Abitronix
Abitronix is a trusted technology advisor helping organizations across industries select and deploy best-in-class solutions in unified communications, cybersecurity, surveillance, and managed services.
About SIPPIO
SIPPIO is the award-winning voice platform that offers the easiest and fastest way to activate calling in Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Zoom.
