The situation.
The client is a multinational retail group operating 4,200 stores and twelve distribution centres across Europe and Latin America. Its CA Technologies estate had grown organically over more than fifteen years and included Automic Workload Automation for scheduled batch, Clarity PPM for portfolio management, and AutoSys for the legacy distribution-centre orchestration. The estate spanned mainframe MSU capacity, distributed agents, and a Clarity user base of approximately 1,400 named licences.
Broadcom's audit letter arrived nine months after the CA renewal had been signed at materially higher pricing than the prior cycle. The opening claim was $4.3 million, with the bulk of the assertion concentrated in MSU over-consumption on Automic and AutoSys, and a named-user reconstruction on Clarity PPM that exceeded the contracted licence count.
The complication.
CA audits are uniquely complex because the asserted metric varies by product line and by historical entitlement. Automic uses both MSU-equivalent metering on mainframe and agent-based metering on distributed, AutoSys uses scheduler-instance metering, and Clarity uses named-user metering with concurrent-user equivalents in older contracts. The auditor's reconstruction had blurred several of these distinctions.
The Clarity named-user reconstruction was particularly aggressive. The auditor had counted every AD account with any history of Clarity access in the audit period — including contractor accounts that had been deactivated, training accounts created for an onboarding wave that never completed, and service accounts used by integration tooling — as a consuming named user. The client's contracted entitlement was 1,400 named licences; the auditor's count was 2,120.
The response.
The defence treated each product as a separate sub-engagement with its own metric reconstruction. For Automic, the team built a mainframe-MSU consumption profile from SMF records and demonstrated that peak monthly MSU consumption had never exceeded the contracted capacity in the audit period. The auditor's claim had used a maximum-instantaneous reconstruction that included transient peaks measured in seconds and not previously contractually metered. The MSU correction removed approximately $1.1 million.
For AutoSys, the team established that the auditor had counted both production and disaster-recovery scheduler instances as licensable, when the client's contract included a documented DR carve-out. The DR carve-out had been negotiated in a 2017 amendment that the auditor had not initially reviewed. The carve-out removed approximately $480,000.
For Clarity PPM, the named-user reconstruction was the most evidence-intensive piece of work. The team produced an AD account-status history showing that 480 of the asserted 2,120 named users had been deactivated for more than 90 days at some point in the audit period and that 240 of those accounts had been service accounts or training accounts used for non-Clarity purposes. The net consuming named-user count came down to 1,400 — within the contracted entitlement.
The bundle decomposition argument completed the defence. Broadcom's auditor had priced certain Automic agents at the Automic Enterprise bundle rate, when the original entitlement was held at the Automic Workload Automation standalone rate. The bundle decomposition argument removed a further $670,000 from the assertion.
The final settlement was reached after five rounds of evidence and three commercial conversations, closing at $1.6 million. The structure included a Clarity entitlement true-up at one third of the originally asserted gap, an Automic forward-pricing concession on the next renewal, and a written release of the audit period.
The outcome.
The documented saving against the opening claim is $2.7 million, a 63% reduction. The Automic forward-pricing concession is worth an estimated $1.4 million over the next three-year renewal cycle, on the client's current consumption profile. The client also recovered a written DR carve-out re-acknowledgement that closes the ambiguity that produced part of the assertion in this audit.
The forward-looking control that came out of the engagement is a CA-specific licence dashboard that consolidates Automic MSU, AutoSys scheduler count, and Clarity active-named-user data into a single quarterly compliance pack. The dashboard is the source of truth for any future CA audit notice.
