Cisco Business Edition 4000 BE4S-V-K9 – Cloud-Provisioned Small Business Call Control Appliance

Product Overview

Cisco BE4S-V-K9 is a Cisco Business Edition 4000 appliance, Cisco's cloud-provisioned on-premises call control platform for small businesses and small multi-site organisations. Call processing, voicemail and auto attendant run on the appliance at the customer site, while a Cisco partner configures and manages it entirely through a cloud portal rather than a local admin interface. Cisco announced the end-of-sale of the BE4000 solution on 22 November 2019 with a purchasing cutoff of 22 May 2020 and an end-of-life date of 31 May 2023, and now lists Business Edition 4000 on its Unified Communications Retired Products page. Treat this as an installed-base and spares purchase only.

Product Description

One dependency should be settled before any BE4000 purchase: the product's provisioning and management ran through Cisco's cloud portal at be4000.cisco.com, with deployment at be4000.cisco.com/deploy, and Cisco does not state on a live page whether that portal remains available after the 31 May 2023 end-of-life date. Cisco also states that on retirement it purposely removes documentation, downloads and product pages from cisco.com, so the appliance's hardware platform designation, dimensions, weight, rack units, power consumption, operating temperature, approvals, maximum phones per site and voicemail capacity are no longer published anywhere - and are not guessed at here.

What Cisco did publish covers the chassis interfaces and the dial plan. The appliance runs from a 110/220 VAC feed and provides two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces (0/0/1 and 0/0/0, with 0/0/0 also available as 10 Gigabit), two interface slots for network interface modules, and console and diagnostics ports; the GBIC, USB and AUX ports are marked as not used. Cloud provisioning requires working internet access, and Cisco states a minimum of 2 Mbps.

Dial plan constraints are specific and worth designing around: up to 98 DID numbers for SIP trunks and 98 for ISDN trunks, only one PSTN access SIP trunk per site, a maximum of 16 phones on one shared line, one auto attendant per system, configurable 3 to 5 digit extensions, no limit on the number of BE4000 sites and mesh intersite dialling across up to six sites. Endpoints are Cisco 7800 and 8800 Series IP phones including the 7832, 8831 and 8832 conference phones and the 8821 wireless phone, plus Cisco ATA 190 and 191 adapters. Cisco's published migration options were Cisco Webex Calling or locally managed Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express. See network hardware for rack infrastructure, conference audio systems for the conference phones it supports, and Cisco for the wider range.

Key Features

• Cloud-managed on-premises call control — Call processing stays on the customer's own appliance while configuration is done through Cisco's cloud portal, so a partner can deploy and change a site without a local admin console.
• Multi-site dialling — Cisco places no limit on the number of BE4000 sites and supports up to six sites in a mesh topology, so a small multi-branch business can dial by extension between locations.
• Flexible PSTN options — SIP trunk, ISDN PRI, ISDN BRI and analog FXS connectivity are all supported, which suits a site part-way through an ISDN-to-SIP migration.
• Broad Cisco phone support — The Cisco 7800 and 8800 Series desk, conference and wireless phones are supported, along with Cisco ATA 190 and 191 adapters for analog phones and fax machines.
• Built-in voicemail and auto attendant — Personal voicemail boxes, group voicemail and an auto attendant are part of the system, so a small site needs no separate messaging server.
• Business-hours and night service handling — Business hours, a night service schedule and manual night service activation from a phone route out-of-hours calls without an external service.
• End-user self-service — Users can join and leave hunt groups, set Single Number Reach, reset their voicemail PIN and manage forwarding and speed dials from the phone, which reduces administrator workload.
• Rack-mount appliance with grounding kit — Rack-mounting and chassis grounding kits ship in the box, so the unit installs into a standard comms cabinet without extra hardware.

Typical Applications

• Commercial meeting space — Small offices and branch sites used the BE4000 as the call control behind their desk and conference phones.
• Conference room — Rooms fitted with Cisco 7832, 8831 or 8832 conference phones registered to this appliance for dial tone and voicemail.
• Multi-purpose room — Sites with paging groups and night service schedules used the appliance to route calls across shared spaces.

Technical Specifications