Before we look at what Cisco True-Forward is, we must explain the traditional true-up. A true-up is the industry standard and if you’ve been involved with technology licensing at any point in your career you will likely be familiar with this term.
When a software agreement is drawn up, the customer provides a “good-faith” estimate of the usage they expect the software to have within their organisation, based on parameters such as the number of users or devices. The price of the software agreement is then based on this estimate.
From here, an annual usage review date is set where the vendor will inspect the actual usage of the software by the customer. If the customer has deployed a different software platform from the same vendor within that year, the vendor will check when they began using it and calculate how much money they are owed for that previous period. The customer pays this and then continues paying for it for the subsequent years going forward. This is a true-up.