CA mainframe licensing under Broadcom. The savings are in the products you retire.

Broadcom prices CA mainframe software on contracted MIPS or MSU sub capacity. In the renewals we advise, the largest savings came from removing idle products and truing capacity down to actual use, not from negotiating the headline rate.

How does Broadcom license CA mainframe software?

Broadcom licenses the CA mainframe portfolio on capacity. Older contracts use MIPS, a count of processing capacity fixed at signature. Newer contracts use MSUs, the same unit IBM uses, measured as a rolling four hour average on the LPARs where each product runs.

Broadcom bought CA Technologies in 2018 for $18.9 billion and with it the largest mainframe software portfolio outside IBM: 50 plus products. Most enterprises run 5 to 15 of them, each priced as its own line on the order.

How does MIPS licensing work on a CA contract?

Broadcom meters each MIPS based subscription against the MIPS you contracted at signature. If consumption goes above that figure, True Forward escalation bills the excess at a premium.

The reverse does not happen. Broadcom does not support a mid term true down, so a customer whose mainframe shrinks keeps paying for the contracted MIPS until the renewal. That asymmetry is where a lot of overpayment builds up.

What changes when a product switches to the MSU metric?

Broadcom is moving the portfolio from MIPS to MSUs, aligned with IBM's model. Sub capacity licensing then prices each product on the rolling four hour average of the individual LPARs and workload groups where it runs, instead of on the full capacity of the machine.

Sub capacity pricing depends on reporting. The reports must run every month and be archived, and if they are missing when Broadcom audits, the default is full capacity pricing.

What is Broadcom Mainframe Consumption Licensing?

Mainframe Consumption Licensing (MCL) is Broadcom's consumption based option. It measures hourly total z/OS MSUs consumed across all production LPARs instead of the rolling four hour average, and prices the whole stack as one pool with no product line items.

• Baseline. You and Broadcom agree an MSU baseline for the term, set from at least 3, and up to 12, months of SCRT reports.
• Overage. Usage above the baseline is billed at one price for the whole mainframe stack, fixed at the start of the contract.
• Reporting. The ISV SCRT report is due by the 10th day of each month and must come from SCRT version 25.2 or higher, which carries the hourly data.
• True up. The standard true up is annual, and unused MSUs can roll over into the next true up period during the term.

Because MCL has no product lines, the idle products have to come out before the baseline is set. Once they sit inside a pooled MSU number, there is no line to cut at the next renewal.

Why do Broadcom CA renewals go up 30 to 80 percent?

Mainframe customers are captive, and a CA contract without a cap allows Broadcom to reprice growth. Replacing a CA product usually means years of refactoring, so since the acquisition Broadcom has applied increases in that range at renewal across documented enterprise cases.

The largest uplifts landed where the mainframe grew without a negotiated cap. Contracts run three to five year terms with annual billing, so a bad first year repeats across the term.

What will the Broadcom account team say, and how should you answer?

• "The price reflects your capacity growth." Ask for the growth by product and by LPAR. Machine growth only matters for a product if it happened in the LPARs where that product runs.
• "Removing products breaks the bundle discount." Ask to see the discount recalculated without them. If the saving on the removed lines is larger than the discount lost, the bundle is costing you money.
• "True downs are not available on this contract." Agree that none happen mid term, then state that the renewal quantity will be set from your measured consumption.
• "This offer expires at quarter end." Your term end sets the date that matters. Use a Broadcom quarter end to close terms you already want, on your own timetable.

Where does the money in a CA renewal actually go?

Much of it goes to products no longer in use. In our renewals, one or two families carried the real workload while 30 to 50 percent of the bundle sat idle, and Broadcom billed those idle lines at the same renewal uplift as everything else.

A workload analysis separates the products you cannot live without from the ones you can negotiate over, and from the ones you can simply stop paying for.

• Map the dependencies. Heavy CICS workloads lean on CA Workload Automation and Sysview. Applications built on Datacom or IDMS depend on those databases directly, while Db2 shops more often depend on Broadcom's Database Management Solutions for Db2 tools. The workload decides how much room you have.
• Mark what is commercially critical. These products have no alternative short of years of refactoring. The negotiation is about caps and terms, and exit is off the table.
• Mark what is commercially negotiable. IBM or BMC alternatives exist with a manageable migration cost. A credible, priced alternative here changes the whole proposal.
• Retire the idle. Removing a product with no use is worth more than any rate concession on what remains, and it needs no replacement project.

Why we would not start with the MIPS rate

The usual advice is to benchmark the price per MIPS and push for a better discount. We disagree with starting there. If 10 products cost roughly the same, a 10 point better rate saves about 10 percent, while removing 3 of them saves about 30.

A scope cut also lowers the base for every later renewal, whereas a discount can be reopened at the next one. Work scope first, then quantity, then term length, and apply the rate last to a smaller number.

How do you check which CA products you actually use?

With data from your own systems, gathered before Broadcom asks for it. The deployment audit answers two questions for each product: does it run, and at what consumption.

• LMP keys. Pull the License Management Program key list for each CPU. It shows what you are licensed to run and where.
• SMF 89 records. Broadcom product LMP key checks write SMF 89 usage records. If SMF 89 recording is active in every LPAR, a product with no records over a full year has almost certainly not run in that year.
• Broadcom ISV SCRT reports. The CAISCRT job shipped with Common Components and Services, run through IBM SCRT, lists the Broadcom products that ran at least once in the month and the LPARs they ran in. Its MSU figures measure z/OS consumption in those LPARs while each product was active.
• SMF 70 records and RMF. These give the LPAR level usage you need for the MIPS reconciliation and the rolling four hour average.
• Product owners. Ask each team which CA tools their jobs, screens and runbooks call. Usage data finds the idle products; owners confirm that nothing breaks when they go.

How do you reconcile deployed MIPS against contracted MIPS?

Compare your measured peak capacity for each product's LPARs with the MIPS written into the order. Where usage dropped after workloads moved to distributed platforms, customers who kept the historical commitment overpaid 15 to 30 percent.

Because the renewal is the only point where Broadcom will take the number down, run this reconciliation at every renewal without exception. The MSU and MIPS reduction guide shows how to measure a peak that holds up.

How much can MSU sub capacity licensing save on CA products?

On products that support it, customers on full capacity pricing with multiple LPARs and varying workloads cut those lines by 25 to 50 percent. The saving comes from licensing only the LPARs and workload groups where a product runs, at their measured rolling four hour average.

The rolling four hour average, LPAR level sub capacity and workload license charge categories all mirror IBM's model, so the peak management that lowers your IBM MLC bill also lowers the CA bill on migrated products. The mainframe CIO advisory covers the IBM side, and the PVU to VPC transition guide shows the same metric conversion on distributed software.

What reporting keeps you on sub capacity pricing?

Complete monthly reports, submitted on time and archived. Broadcom accepts ISV SCRT reports generated with IBM SCRT only and rejects reports from third party SCRT tools; they are uploaded through its SCRT Report Management portal.

Gaps cost money. In our engagements, missing sub capacity reports left one in three customers exposed to full capacity pricing under audit. Keep every monthly report and its SMF input for the full contract term and any audit lookback period.

Retiring a product with no use saves more than any discount on the products that remain.

What does a prepared CA renewal look like in numbers?

The example below is hypothetical. Say you pay Broadcom $3,000,000 a year for 10 CA products on 5,000 contracted MIPS, and the opening renewal proposal adds 40 percent. For simplicity, price is assumed to move in line with MIPS and to stay flat across the term.

The rate per MIPS was never discussed, yet the result sits inside the 20 to 35 percent range our prepared renewals achieved. Only 2 of 10 products were retired here, so a customer with a larger idle share would save more. A cap on annual increases then protects the $3,213,000 base for the rest of the term.

How should you run a CA renewal 12 to 18 months out?

Run it as a fixed sequence of five steps, each feeding the next. Each step needs two to six months, and the sequence has to finish before Broadcom's quote sets the terms of the discussion.

The captive position is the reason for the preparation. Broadcom knows replacement takes years, so your room comes from reducing scope and from the negotiable subset, not from threatening to leave the critical products. The newer MSPS portfolio packaging and how its bundles work are covered in our CA mainframe pricing analysis.

Which contract terms should you ask for?

• A cap on annual increases. This stops capacity growth from repricing the whole bundle, including lines you rarely use.
• A price hold on growth capacity. Additional MIPS or MSUs should be billed at the renewal unit price instead of the True Forward premium.
• Product removal rights. The right to drop named products at each anniversary means you can retire software as migrations finish, instead of waiting for the next renewal.
• A capacity reduction right. Even a limited true down at anniversaries closes the gap that cost post migration customers the most.
• A reporting cure period. A missed monthly SCRT report should trigger a written notice and time to fix it before any move to full capacity pricing.
• MCL roll over in writing. If you move to consumption licensing, confirm unused MSUs roll into the next true up period in writing.

Our guide to negotiating Broadcom price caps sets out how the cap wording tends to be argued.

How does this differ for a smaller mainframe customer?

A customer with one machine, a single production LPAR and 5 CA products gains little from sub capacity, because the product already runs on most of the capacity. The savings come from scope, and a priced alternative for one or two negotiable products carries more weight when the order is short.

A large customer with several machines, many LPARs and 15 products usually finds more idle lines and gains most from sub capacity pricing. It also has the most to lose if SCRT reporting breaks, so reporting controls belong in its renewal preparation from the first month.

What have we seen in recent CA mainframe renewals?

Across roughly 20 to 30 Broadcom CA mainframe renewals I advised between 2024 and 2025, the bill was driven by bundled families that no one still used.

Which pattern cost customers the most?

The capacity growth reset. A customer adds capacity for one growing application, the contract has no cap, and the renewal reprices every line on the order at the new size, including products that had not been started in years.

Three pieces of work reversed that. The deployment audit removed idle products from scope, the reconciliation brought capacity down to actual use, and the cap held the price path. Together they produced savings of 20 to 35 percent against Broadcom's opening proposals, compounding across the term.

What to do next

1. 18 months out. Start the renewal sequence: deployment audit, reconciliation, workload analysis, alternatives and target model.
2. Retire idle products. Remove every CA product with no SMF 89 activity, once its owners confirm it is unused, from the renewal scope before any price discussion.
3. Reconcile capacity. Compare measured peak MIPS or MSUs with the contract, because the renewal is the only true down window.
4. Move to sub capacity. Transition supported products to MSU sub capacity pricing and confirm every monthly SCRT report is submitted and archived.
5. Price the alternatives. Cost IBM and BMC replacements for the negotiable products so the proposal has a credible fallback.
6. Write the protections in. Cap the uplift, hold growth pricing and secure removal rights. Our Broadcom practice can run the renewal with you.

Frequently asked questions