A US healthcare network with 28 hospitals and 96 outpatient sites was three months from renewing a multi-suite Cisco EA covering networking, collaboration, and security. Cisco had proposed a 22% uplift with a mandatory addition of two suite expansions. We unwound the True Forward miscount, eliminated two shelfware suites, and resized the renewal to actual consumption.
The client — a regional healthcare network operating 28 acute-care hospitals and 96 outpatient sites — had been on a five-year Cisco Enterprise Agreement covering Catalyst networking, Webex collaboration, and Cisco Secure (Umbrella, Duo, AMP) since 2021. The EA was nearing renewal with three months of runway. Cisco's account team presented a renewal proposal with three problems: a $640K True Forward charge tied to claimed Webex active-user growth, a 22% uplift across all three suites, and a mandatory expansion adding Cisco Identity Services Engine and ThousandEyes to the agreement.
The internal Cisco-side narrative was that consumption had grown beyond the EA's elastic threshold and the next term needed to reflect that reality. Our reading was different. The True Forward calculation appeared to count contractor and temporary clinical staff as active Webex users, the suite uplift was being benchmarked against vendor list rather than the network's actual consumption pattern, and the ISE/ThousandEyes attach was being framed as bundled optimization rather than a separately negotiable expansion.
In our experience across Cisco EA renewals, the True Forward mechanism is where the largest unforced errors happen. The contract gives Cisco the right to bill for growth above a baseline at the start of the renewal year — but the baseline is rarely re-verified, and what gets counted as an "active user" depends on which integration is reading the activity data. Healthcare networks are especially exposed because clinical-staff turnover, residency rotations, and contractor utilization inflate the active-user count if you don't filter the report carefully.
True Forward calculations should be re-verified, not accepted at face value.
We pulled six months of Webex active-user reports and cross-referenced them against the HRIS active-employee feed and the contractor management system. Of the 3,200 active users above baseline that Cisco was billing for, 1,840 turned out to be contractors with overlapping seat assignments, residents in expired rotations, or accounts that had been deactivated in HRIS but remained active in Webex due to a sync delay. The corrected baseline reduced the True Forward charge by $470K.
The proposed expansion to ISE and ThousandEyes was unbundled. The network already had a Forescout deployment serving the access-control function ISE was being positioned for. ThousandEyes was being pitched as essential for digital experience monitoring, but the network's clinical applications were already covered by Catchpoint. Both expansions were removed from the renewal scope. We also identified two existing suite components — Webex Calling on 4,200 of the 26,000 seats and AMP for Endpoints on a 7,000-seat overlap with CrowdStrike — that were running below 15% utilization and were dropped from the renewal entitlement.
With the True Forward corrected and shelfware removed, the renewal scope had moved by approximately 28% in the customer's favour before the uplift conversation began. The proposed 22% uplift was reframed against the resized scope and benchmarked against Cisco's prevailing renewal pattern for comparable healthcare networks. We landed on flat ACV across a three-year term with a year-three credit clause tied to enterprise-agreement portability.
Cisco EA renewals reward customers who do their own baseline work. The True Forward mechanism is contractual, but the inputs to it are operational — they live in HRIS, in MDM, in identity systems, in licence telemetry. Customers who rebuild the baseline from those sources have a much different conversation than customers who accept Cisco's tooling output as ground truth. Suite-level rationalization runs on the same logic: you need utilization evidence before you can shift the conversation.
If you are 9–12 months from a Cisco EA renewal, the audit of active-user feeds and suite-level consumption needs to start now. The Cisco EA Playbook walks through the True Forward reconciliation framework used on this engagement.
The True Forward reconciliation framework used on this engagement.
Our Cisco practice is led by former EA programme managers and renewal architects. We rebuild True Forward baselines from operational systems before the renewal conversation begins.
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