Nobody migrates to the cloud for the sustainability metrics.
Computacenter moved its contact center operations to Genesys Cloud to escape aging infrastructure, technical debt and the limits of an on-premise system that was holding back innovation.
But when the project wrapped three months early — with 213 servers decommissioned and 2,500 agents across 16 locations running on a single platform — the environmental case wrote itself.
Cloud migration by the numbers
In 2020, research from Accenture found that migrating to the public cloud can cut total IT carbon emissions by 5.9% — the equivalent of removing 22 million cars from the road annually.
For organizations that migrate to AWS-hosted platforms, AWS found that the carbon footprint reduction can reach 80% or more compared to on-premises infrastructure.
For Computacenter, those numbers aren’t abstract. Luke Stephenson, who led the migration before taking his current role as head of product management for Genesys at the company, describes a starting point most IT leaders will recognize.
“Our previous contact center platform was on-premises, and like a lot of those solutions, we had accumulated significant technical debt,” Stephenson said. “Our ability to innovate and move forward in the market was starting to get hampered.”
The migration, covering approximately 80 customers, 16 global locations and 2,500 agents, ran from December 2023 to March 2024, against an original deadline of June 2025.
The environmental case for moving to cloud
By shifting from an aging on-premises platform to Genesys Cloud, which runs on AWS, Computacenter has connected its contact center operations to infrastructure that itself targets 100% renewable energy.
With this, the migration reduced the direct CO2e footprint of Computacenter’s operations while simultaneously plugging into a supply chain with its own ambitious decarbonization commitments.
Computacenter sources a high proportion of its electricity from renewables and generates clean power from its own solar installation at its Hatfield, England headquarters. It also operates a device recycling program as part of its Circular Services division.
“A lot of those customers are looking at the sustainability and innovation aspects,” Stephenson said. “We’re able to actually show that we’re on that journey.”
How they did it: Infrastructure-as-code at scale
The company selected Genesys through a formal request-for-proposal process supported by third-party consultant Stable Logic.
According to the firm, the key to the migration’s success was an infrastructure-as-code tool called CX as Code.
The tool allows developers to create templates of customer workflows and deploy them consistently across test and production environments, helping to reduce the risk of bugs reaching live systems.
Computacenter conducted approximately 25,000 tests across all customer implementations during the migration and identified around 1,000 bugs in total.
The firm says that fewer than 3% were reported by customers, while the rest were caught and resolved internally.
“It may feel like you’re slowing down with the start of CX as Code, but it’s very much a case of ‘slow down to speed up,’” Stephenson said. He noted the executive steering board challenged the initial pace, but the approach ultimately allowed for early completion.
The migration consolidated multiple platforms into a single system, reducing the need for agents to switch between different tools for reporting, workforce management and scheduling — and ultimately replacing some processes that had previously relied on spreadsheets.
“The general satisfaction for our users is far better now,” Stephenson said. “They’re working in one platform that is stable and does what it says.”
The AI adoption curve
Computacenter has also deployed Genesys’s AI-powered Copilot tool, which automatically summarizes customer interactions. Agent adoption followed a familiar pattern: initial nervousness giving way to confidence within a week, as workers verified the system’s accuracy.
“When it first went in, we saw some of the agents be a little bit nervous,” Stephenson said. “After less than a week, they had the confidence that their summaries were coming in appropriately.”
Claire Beatty, senior director of customer marketing at Genesys, describes the trust-building process organizations should expect when deploying AI tools: “I think the other thing is around using AI, but also giving people the space to get trust with it. With Copilot, you launch it, but you have to expect people’s metrics to kind of go down a bit because it’s a new tool.”
“Providing a reliable response, giving people a grace period to review the transcript — ‘Yes, this is right. Yes, this is wrong’ — there’s going to be a dip in performance. And then actually, yes, we can trust the tools, now pick it up.”
Lessons for others
The company used a four-environment pipeline structure to test changes before deploying to production. It has since become a key development partner for Genesys on the CX as Code capability.
The migration also enabled better support for hybrid working: the internet-facing platform, secured with appropriate controls, allows agents to work remotely far more easily than the previous on-premises system allowed.
For organizations considering similar projects, Stephenson’s advice is to invest time in the foundations.