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Sweetwater: Harmony After Mitel

Multi-billion-dollar music retailer Sweetwater migrates from a legacy Mitel on-premise system to 8x8 — eliminating 12 servers, improving call quality for 600 sales engineers, and handling 32,000 inbound calls on Black Friday with zero hold time.

The Challenge

Sweetwater was running an aging Mitel on-premise PBX across 12 servers — expensive to maintain, difficult to troubleshoot, and no longer capable of supporting the scale and customization a 3,000-person music retailer required.

The Solution

CTPros guided Sweetwater through a structured vendor evaluation process and executed the full migration to 8x8, delivering a cloud platform that handles 30,000 daily calls and integrates with Twilio for the custom workflows Sweetwater's business depends on.

About Sweetwater

Sweetwater is one of the most recognized names in online and brick-and-mortar music retail, headquartered on a 480,000 square foot campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Founded in 1979, the company employs approximately 3,000 people and ships upward of 15,000 invoices daily. Sweetwater's commitment to customer service is legendary in the industry — 600 sales engineers field roughly 30,000 inbound calls and 30,000 text messages every day, and on Black Friday 2023, handled 32,000 inbound calls with zero hold time.

Twelve Servers, Thousands of Extensions, and a System Showing Its Age

For eight years, Sweetwater's Mitel on-premise PBX had served the business well enough. But the company had grown tremendously since the original deployment, and the system was starting to show its age in ways that a retailer built on exceptional customer experience couldn't afford to ignore.

JP Eagleson, Sweetwater's Director of IT Infrastructure, was managing 12 on-premise servers — paying to maintain hardware that was increasingly difficult to troubleshoot. Adding extensions for the growing sales engineering team was a manual, error-prone process. Costs were climbing for new phones. Vendor support was waning. And capacity issues were becoming a real concern. Sweetwater was genuinely worried the Mitel system wouldn't hold together long enough for the company to migrate off of it.

Beyond the operational burden, the system's limitations were beginning to touch the customer experience — the thing Sweetwater values above everything else. Sales engineers with highly trained ears could hear latency and call quality issues on certain platforms during early evaluations. For a team fielding 30,000 calls a day with customers who are themselves professional musicians and audio engineers, that was a non-starter. Sweetwater needed to move, and they needed to move quickly.

The team had previously worked with CTPros on the Mitel system and trusted them to guide the next transition. As JP put it, they already had an established relationship where they knew they could trust CTPros and that CTPros understood their business.

Speed Dating With Vendors — and a Migration Executed in a Hurry

The format worked. Sweetwater narrowed the field to two finalists and ran proof-of-concept engagements with both. 8x8 was the clear choice — cloud-based, eliminating the server maintenance burden, with simple user extension buildout, a strong soft phone application, and critically, the call quality Sweetwater's sales engineers required. 8x8's Center of Excellence worked on-site alongside CTPros to validate Sweetwater's specific requirements, including the API integrations with Twilio that Sweetwater depends on for custom SMS workflows, intelligent call routing, and customer pickup notifications.

From there, CTPros' Technical Account Management team took over — mapping out the migration timeline, holding weekly review meetings with Sweetwater throughout the process, and providing customized training before go-live so the team could adopt the new system without disruption. The migration was executed by CTPros directly.

Fewer Servers, Better Calls, and a Black Friday With Zero Hold Time

The move to 8x8 eliminated the 12-server on-premise infrastructure that had been consuming IT time and budget. Extension management — previously a manual, error-prone process for a team of 600 sales engineers — became simple. IT capacity that had been going toward hardware maintenance freed up for other initiatives.

For the sales engineers who live on the phones, the difference was immediately noticeable. 8x8's call quality met the standard Sweetwater's team requires — the kind of clarity that matters when your customers are professional musicians and audio engineers who will notice the difference. The soft phone application earned strong feedback across the team.

The Twilio integrations that power Sweetwater's custom call routing, SMS workflows, and customer pickup notifications remained intact — a critical requirement that 8x8 met without compromise. Individual agent queues, intelligent routing based on customer type and sales engineer skill set, and the customizations Sweetwater had built around the customer experience all carried forward.

And on Black Friday — Sweetwater's Super Bowl — 600 sales engineers and customer service representatives handled approximately 32,000 inbound calls with zero hold time. The infrastructure held. The customer experience held. That's the outcome.

JP's advice for other IT leaders navigating a similar migration: invest in the right partner, document thoroughly for end users, and use a crawl-walk-run-sprint methodology to get early feedback and course correct quickly. The tech, as he put it, is the easy part.

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