Wilson County IT staff told the commissioners court they plan to replace the county'wide phone system with a cloud-based service intended to unify extensions across offices and reduce reliance on aging local servers. The presenter said the change would let users call internal extensions without dialing an outside line and would allow desktop faxing.

The proposal matters because the county currently runs multiple on-site servers and copper-dependent services that staff described as deprecated and costly to maintain. "We're supposed to unify our current phone network ... and it'll be in the cloud," the IT presenter said. The presenter said the initial setup costs were "approximately 10 k" and estimated that the first year of the contract "would probably save close to 15 to $20" with about "$2,000" in annual savings thereafter.

Commissioners asked about operational continuity and emergency support. The IT presenter said the vendor would provide a support contract and an app for phones, and that the county would have enough phones configured to recover the emergency operations center. The presenter also said cloud faxing would let staff "fax your desktop instead of having a fax machine." Commissioners asked whether the county could troubleshoot the system in-house; the presenter said county IT could troubleshoot and that a vendor support contract would supplement that work.

Discussion also covered contract details: a commissioner asked the contract length and was told it is three years. The presenter said the county currently runs multiple fax lines ("we have over 10"), and cited a month when the county logged about 47 faxes; commissioners used those figures to question whether the county could reduce the number of physical fax lines after migration.

No formal vote on the phone contract is recorded in the transcript. The court directed staff to proceed with questions for the procurement process and clarified operational expectations, including emergency operations continuity and training requirements.

County staff said they had spoken with the applicable public-safety chief about participation in the interview or implementation team; one chief was reported unavailable for interviews. The presenter noted a cybersecurity-training requirement for vendor staff and said the vendor requires completion of certified cybersecurity training as part of their deployment.

If the court proceeds to contract, staff said the county would move deprecated servers out of production and expects the change to reduce recurring maintenance costs while enabling unified internal dialing and desktop faxing.