① Explainer · Licensing concepts
Under Broadcom (CA) Mainframe Consumption Licensing, True Forward is the mechanism that reconciles measured MSU consumption against your contracted baseline. Grow above the line and the higher capacity is priced forward for the rest of the term. Here is the mechanism, a worked true up example, and the asymmetry you negotiate before you sign.
Growth that goes up and stays up.
True Forward is the reconciliation step inside Broadcom (CA) Mainframe Consumption Licensing, the usage based subscription that replaced traditional perpetual plus maintenance across the CA mainframe portfolio. At signing you commit to a baseline level of capacity, expressed in MSU or MIPS, derived from your recent consumption. At each true up the vendor compares your measured consumption against that baseline. If you have grown above it, the additional capacity is priced forward and added to your committed level for the remainder of the term. The name is literal: the adjustment trues your spend forward, applying to future periods, rather than billing a retroactive charge for months already consumed.
That sounds gentler than a backward true up, and on the surface it is. The catch is the asymmetry. True Forward moves the baseline up when you grow, but it commonly does not move back down when you shrink. Once a spike lifts the committed level, that level typically holds for the rest of the term. This explainer sits alongside our Broadcom (CA) renewal advisory, where the baseline and the true up rules are the levers we negotiate first.
How True Forward treats movement against the baseline
| Scenario | What True Forward does | Buyer effect |
|---|---|---|
| Consumption above baseline | Prices the overage forward, raising the committed level for the rest of the term | Cost steps up and the step is durable |
| Consumption below baseline | Commonly held against the committed level; no automatic reduction | You keep paying the baseline you committed to |
| One time spike | Can lift the baseline permanently unless a peak or averaging rule is negotiated | A single event becomes a recurring cost |
| Development and test growth | Counts toward consumption unless explicitly carved out | Non production work inflates the production bill |
| Underage carried forward | Only where negotiated; rolls unused capacity into a later period | Flexibility against a future spike, if you secured it |
One quarter of growth, priced for three years.
Take an estate that commits to a 5,000 MSU baseline on a three year MCL term. For the first year consumption sits comfortably under the baseline. In the second year a new workload pushes the measured consumption to 5,800 MSU. At the true up, True Forward prices the 800 MSU of overage forward and resets the committed baseline to 5,800 MSU for the remaining term. Even if the new workload is later retired and consumption falls back toward 5,000 MSU, the committed level stays at 5,800 unless a step down right was negotiated. The illustration below shows the shape; the exact rates depend on your contract.
The figures are illustrative, but the pattern is the one we see: True Forward converts a temporary peak into a permanent floor. The 16 percent uplift here recurs for every remaining true up of the term. Capping a single true up rise and negotiating a step down right are how you keep a spike from becoming a fixture.
The committed level should come from your own SCRT history, independently validated, not a vendor sizing estimate. An inflated baseline is overpayment from day one; a baseline set at a transient peak locks in that peak.
The baseline is the price; set it cold.
Negotiate a ceiling on how far the committed level can move at any one true up. A cap turns an open ended escalation into a bounded one and stops a single workload event from rewriting the deal.
An uncapped true up is a blank check forward.
The default asymmetry is up but not down. A negotiated step down lets the committed level fall when sustained consumption drops, so retiring a workload actually reduces the bill instead of stranding the capacity.
Symmetry is the whole negotiation.
Exclude development and test from the measured number, then shape the production peak with capping and zIIP offload so the figure that drives True Forward stays inside the baseline you committed to.
The cheapest overage is the one you never measure.
The reconciliation step in Broadcom (CA) Mainframe Consumption Licensing. At each true up, measured consumption is compared to the committed baseline; overage is priced forward for the rest of the term. It is forward because it adjusts future periods rather than billing the past retroactively.
A backward true up bills past overage as a lump sum. True Forward resets the forward run rate instead: the higher capacity becomes the new committed level. The effect is that growth is sticky and usually does not reverse inside the term.
Rarely without negotiation. Overage adjusts the price up; underage is commonly held against the committed level. Some deals let underage roll into a later period, but a straight mid term reduction is uncommon unless you secured a step down right.
Set the baseline on validated SCRT data, cap the single true up rise, win a step down right, carve out development and test, and shape the production peak so the measured number stays inside the committed level.
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