CUCM Business Edition, More Scalable than you might think...

So an interesting question came up recently which I've always assumed the answer to be true, but I've never checked it, until now.

CUCM Business Edition 6000 (CUCMBE6K) is a low (ish) end UC&C solution from Cisco. The call processing element scales up to 1000 users and 2500 devices. But what do you do if you purchased and run CUCMBE6K, and need to expand to over 1000 users?

Well, Business Edition 6K is capped at 1000 users, and as I understand there is nothing you can do about that, but the licenses you have are essentially just CUWL standard, and I assume you are running this on a virtualised server? Even better if you purchased one of the BE6K hardware bundles. So you can migrate the CUWL business edition licenses to CUWL standard (because they are the same), which is a process with the GLO team at Cisco, and this entitles you to download the full version of CUCM. You can therefore just install the full blown CUCM, add your new CUWL standard licenses and scale up to your hearts delight, No more 1000 user cap.

Granted there will be some work here, you'll need to be reasonably savy with CUCM, or just utilise your integrator who sold you the solution in the first place. The other thing is if you purchased a CUCMBE6K hardware bundle you'll need to buy a copy of VMware vSphere (the version with the bundle is cut down for BE6K). But these things are still minimal compared to a whole new system.

I think this is a real unsung scalability feature, its such a minimal cost for such a flexible, scalable solution.