The 30-Year-Old Phone Company That Quietly Became an AI-Era IT Shop

In the summer of 1994, while most people were still learning what a modem was for, a regional telephone company in Cincinnati started a small unit to help businesses wrangle their technology. That unit was Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions. Today it goes by four letters - CBTS - and it is a roughly $1.3 billion IT services firm that keeps the cloud running, the networks secure, and the phones ringing for more than 3,000 organizations across North America.

The through-line from then to now is not glamorous, and that is rather the point. CBTS sells the infrastructure that companies depend on but would rather not think about. When it works, nobody notices. The company's own framing is refreshingly plain: its job, it says, is to make clients heroes by designing, building, and operating the technology foundations that power their growth.

Six practice areas, one roof .

The pitch to a mid-market CFO is simple: stop juggling ten vendors. CBTS organizes its work into six connected practices, so a company can hand over as much or as little of its technology stack as it wants and deal with one partner instead of a procurement spreadsheet.

That last box, network and infrastructure, is the family inheritance. CBTS grew up managing communications networks, which gave it more than a decade's head start handling the complex, enterprise-scale plumbing that newer competitors had to learn on the job. The AI and data practice is the newest addition, and it is where the company is placing its forward bet - helping clients figure out not just where to store their data but how to build the infrastructure and governance that makes AI usable rather than a science project.

The connective tissue between the six practices is deliberate. A cloud migration usually drags security questions behind it; a communications overhaul touches the network; an AI initiative is useless without clean data pipelines. Because CBTS runs all of these under one contract, it can hand a client a plan that accounts for the dependencies instead of six teams pointing fingers at each other. For an IT director who has lived through a project where the cloud vendor blamed the network vendor who blamed the security vendor, that single-throat-to-choke arrangement is worth paying for.

The 15-year customer .

CBTS aims at enterprise and upper-middle-market organizations - hospitals, banks, manufacturers, school districts, government agencies - the kind of institutions that need serious IT but cannot always justify a full in-house team for every discipline. Managing 800,000-plus endpoints for that crowd is not a rounding error; it is the business.

The number worth staring at is retention. CBTS reports an average client tenure north of 15 years and a Net Promoter Score of 82, which it says runs more than 20 points above the industry benchmark. In a category where switching vendors is a rite of passage, keeping customers for longer than most startups stay alive is the whole competitive moat.

"Make our clients heroes by designing, building, and operating the technology foundations that power growth and innovation."- CBTS, on its purpose

Renting the hard parts .

Most companies do not want to hire a 24-hour security team, staff a cloud migration, and keep a communications platform patched all at once. CBTS exists to absorb exactly those problems. Its cybersecurity practice treats security as a lifecycle rather than a product - penetration testing to find the holes, vulnerability management to prioritize them, managed detection and response to catch what gets through, and a round-the-clock security operations center watching the whole thing. For a business that cannot recruit that talent, renting it is the only realistic option.

The same logic runs through unified communications. UCaaS - unified communications as a service - collapses calling, chat, video, and file sharing into one subscription and lets a company retire the closet full of hardware. CBTS handles the management and the security so the client can just make the call.

Neutral on purpose .

The most consequential design choice at CBTS is that it is vendor-agnostic. It partners with more than 300 technology companies - Microsoft, AWS, Cisco, Dell, HPE, NVIDIA, Palo Alto Networks, and AI players including Anthropic - without being owned by any of them. That means the recommendation a client gets is not quietly a sales quota in disguise. It also earns hard-won credentials, including Palo Alto Networks Advanced Specializations across network, cloud, and security - a trio few partners hold at once.

Neutrality is also a hiring story. A vendor-agnostic firm has to keep engineers certified across competing platforms, which is why the 2,500-plus technical certifications figure is more than a vanity metric - it is the raw material of the promise. When a client asks whether to run a workload on Azure or AWS, the answer is only credible if the people giving it are fluent in both.

In a category where switching vendors is a rite of passage, keeping customers longer than most startups stay alive is the whole competitive moat.- On the CBTS retention record

Certified, not improvised .

Depth is the quiet differentiator. Alongside the certification count sit the Palo Alto Networks Advanced Specializations across network, cloud, and security - designations a partner only earns by demonstrating repeatable, audited capability rather than a single successful project. That kind of credential matters most to the regulated buyers CBTS courts: a hospital or a bank cannot hand its security posture to a firm that is learning on the job. The company's Canadian operations, run under the OnX brand it acquired, add reach without diluting that bench of specialists.

Recurring by design .

CBTS makes money in four overlapping ways: recurring managed-services contracts, project-based professional services and consulting, cloud and UCaaS subscriptions, and the integration and resale of hardware and software. The recurring pieces are what matter most - subscriptions and long-term management agreements are the engine behind those 15-year relationships, and they turn a services firm into something closer to a utility for its clients.

From Bell to buyout .

The 2024 buyout is the plot twist. After three decades inside a telephone company, CBTS was carved out and sold to private-equity firm TowerBrook Capital Partners, closing in December 2024. Fresh ownership brought fresh leadership: in May 2025, Kristin Russell - who had run a $20 billion computing division at Arrow Electronics and served as Colorado's state CIO - stepped in as chief executive to lead what the company calls its next phase of growth. In November 2025, Caroline Burger joined as chief marketing officer.

The team behind the team .

CBTS sits in the crowded middle of the IT services market, competing for mid-market and enterprise work against the likes of Insight Enterprises, SHI, Presidio, World Wide Technology, and Rackspace, with the big consultancies looming above. Its edge is not scale - it is the combination of a telecom heritage, genuine vendor neutrality, and a retention record that suggests clients are getting what they pay for. With a private-equity backer now funding the next act, the quietest IT shop in Cincinnati may find it harder to stay quiet.