Great Works Internet (GWI) has been a fixture of Maine's connectivity landscape since its founding in 1994. Headquartered in Lewiston, the company delivers fiber broadband across the state, serving residential, commercial, and enterprise customers alike. As GWI scaled, its operational stack had grown fragmented and increasingly difficult to manage. By moving to gaiia, the company consolidated and replaced a sprawling set of systems that included Salesforce, Platypus, Gravity Payments, and MPX, along with their supporting tools, into a single platform built for modern broadband providers.
For years, the team at GWI ran their business across a wall of browser tabs. Customer records lived in Salesforce. Billing lived in Platypus. Mailed invoices went through MPX. Provisioning happened in a patchwork of vendor consoles. Many workflows depended on documented SOPs, institutional knowledge of experienced team members and manual coordination across systems.
It worked. It just took six places to find out what was happening with one customer.
This is the story of how GWI replaced Salesforce, and the rest of the systems running alongside it, with one platform.
Salesforce had been the system of record at GWI for years. Every account lived there. Contact lookups started there. The sales team built pipelines there. As a CRM, it was doing its job.
The problem was everything that wasn't CRM.
Platypus handled the actual billing. Voice CDR rating sat outside both systems. Payment processing and customer portal were provided by Gravity Payments. Field service ran out of a different tool. Provisioning had its own consoles for Calix CMS, Calix SMX, and DZS Zhone. Paper invoices went through a third-party print service. Address serviceability ran through Vetro.
By the GWI team's own count, they were touching close to a dozen systems to manage the customer lifecycle.
Each handoff was a place where data could drift. A customer's plan changed in Salesforce but the change didn't make it to Platypus. A new payment method got added in Gravity but never synced back. A technician completed a job in the field but the close-out lived in a different system than the billing trigger. None of these gaps were catastrophic on their own. Together, they were a tax on every customer interaction.
The team had a term for it: the swivel chair.
The obvious question from anyone evaluating a BSS replacement is whether GWI considered building everything on top of Salesforce. They did. The math didn't work.
Salesforce is purpose-built for sales pipelines. Customizing it into a working ISP operational platform means absorbing the cost of every workflow, every billing rule, every provisioning integration, and every commercial account hierarchy as configuration on top of a CRM that wasn't designed for any of it. Upgrades become risk events.
The more scalable path was to replace the stack with a platform built for what GWI actually does.
Migrating a thirty-year-old commercial-heavy ISP off Salesforce and Platypus is not a weekend project. GWI planned it as a phased cutover, with a working principle worth lifting wholesale: go live with what matters most, stabilize the rest.
The migration ran in stages.
Before any data moved, GWI mapped Salesforce account structures and Platypus billing entities to gaiia's data model. Residential mapped cleanly. The complex piece was enterprise: identifying parents, sub-accounts, billing roll-ups, and accounts with subscriptions shared across locations.
GWI's in-house developers used gaiia's API to push thousands of accounts into a sandbox tenant for validation. The dry run surfaced data hygiene issues that had been hiding inside Salesforce and Platypus for years: duplicate payment methods, expired cards still flagged as primary, customers whose billing cycle had drifted off the standard calendar. GWI cleaned them up before they touched production.
GWI built their own provisioning, activation, suspension, and product-change workflows inside gaiia's workflow builder. By go-live week, GWI was running automated workflows that had previously been a sequence of manual steps across three or four tools.
The customer base (accounts, payment methods, subscriptions, billing entities, invoices, inventory) moved into the gaiia production tenant over the course of go-live week. File validation happened in shared documents in real time, with comments and tags replacing what would normally be days of back-and-forth tickets.
The before-and-after isn't a feature list. It's a behavior change.
Most ISP platforms struggle with the things GWI does every day: parent/child account hierarchies where 100% of subscriptions are paid by the parent, voice rating with minute bundles and call-type-dependent taxation, contract-negotiated pricing where the same service has different prices for different customers, and commercial accounts with hundreds of DID blocks across multiple physical locations.
These aren't edge cases for GWI. They're the core of the commercial book.
gaiia's commercial account capabilities (sub-account structures, consolidated billing with per-location detail, account-manager assignment, dedicated permissions, commercial-specific workflows) fit the way GWI's enterprise customers actually buy and pay for service. The migration didn't ask GWI to flatten or simplify their commercial model to fit the platform. It met them where they were.
That's the part that matters for any operator looking at this story and wondering whether their own complexity is a barrier. GWI's complexity was the proof, not the obstacle.