I'm assuming they're paying much more than a football club though.
There's also a legal side in this case because they're actually suing Broadcom: "Tesco claimed Broadcom hiked its VMware prices by about 175 percent in UK court filings."
> The soccer organization confirmed this week to The Register that it has moved its stadium’s server, storage, and networking infrastructure to HPE solutions delivered through HPE’s hybrid cloud management platform, GreenLake.
This is just a much worse version of AWS. Obsession with maintaining some degree of physical control over infrastructure drives many organizations to absolute insanity. Skip the hybrid nonsense. Find a CTO with some balls.
Nonsense. Renting servers is the easiest way to bankrupt your company. Look at all the capacity shortages going on right now. Price will continue to outpace bare metal and controls will get tighter.
Not to mention there are many scenarios where cloud connectivity is not an option.
I would argue that absolute insanity is surrendering all control of infrastructure to cloud providers. Especially when you are using managed services that lock you in, making any plans of migrating way ridiculously painful.
It takes a CTO with cojones to actually own your infrastructure.
Yeah it means nothing without details. They're a new HPE customer so they might be getting a discount the first year or something.
A friend of mine is a virtualization SME and from what I can tell you don't really save that much on the alternatives. Also, HPE sell VMware. HPE has a modular solution where you can pick the hypervisor you want to use, including VMware.
At my $dayjob we use Proxmox and it's good enough. I think Proxmox would be good enough for most orgs.
But my friend works with the tax agency and they definitely make use of vSAN, NSX, and all those nice features that puts VMware above the competition.
There is a 100% chance that someone in Broadcom exec team is making money shorting themselves.
Or else some insider assurance that they'd get so much money from government or some big customer that they could run their products into the ground no matter what. But enterprises are not as locked in as people think.
Broadcom has absolutely zero interest in the long-term future of VMware. Their only goal is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible before it goes bust.
Let's say that VMware had a $10B revenue with a $9B operating cost. If 0.1% of their megacorp customers is responsible for 20% of that revenue while only being 1% of the support needs, then ditching the other 99.9% of customers reduces revenue to $2B while the operating cost can be reduced to $90M - increasing profit from $1B to $1.91B.
Those huge customers are quite locked in, so you can squeeze them for a couple of years before they leave. They have their own in-house support teams, so you can cut all L1/L2 support people. You're killing the product, so you can cut all developers except a handful to patch CVEs. The smaller customers who are leaving are doing some after a massive price hike, so you get a nice one-time renewal bonus while they desperately try to move to alternatives.
No need to do any shorting when you're generating massive profits for a couple of years. The plan when VMware is dead? Cut up its corpse in tiny parts, sell them off, buy another company, repeat the same strategy. As long as the total money they manage to extract from VMware is more than its acquisition cost, Broadcom has succeeded.
Unlike Hock Tan, you forgot to raise the prices 5-10x. Then your 0.1% of customers generating 20% of your revenue turn into 0.1% of your customers generating the same amount of revenue as 100% of customers were before with lower operating costs and thus higher margins.
I didn't realize how addicted some orgs were to VMWare until Broadcom bought them and I witnessed zero people migrate to alternatives. It's been one of the single biggest shocks to me in my career. Watching them get squeezed openly and ruthlessly and just accepting it. I've only ever seen Microsoft pull that off before.
I guess that means that VMWare are very skilled in calculating exactly how much they can hike the price / squeeze. Same with oracle, and all the other vendors that play this game.
It kind of makes sense, if you're using VMWare, your choice is to pay a ridiculous but fixed/certain sum, or embark on a risky migration project that probably involves hiring a bunch of people, could take longer than expected, might fail, etc.
Tesco, a large supermarket chain (also in the UK), is also moving away from VMware:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/06/tesco...
I'm assuming they're paying much more than a football club though.
There's also a legal side in this case because they're actually suing Broadcom: "Tesco claimed Broadcom hiked its VMware prices by about 175 percent in UK court filings."
Kroger has moved to SUSE and Azure Local
> The soccer organization confirmed this week to The Register that it has moved its stadium’s server, storage, and networking infrastructure to HPE solutions delivered through HPE’s hybrid cloud management platform, GreenLake.
This is just a much worse version of AWS. Obsession with maintaining some degree of physical control over infrastructure drives many organizations to absolute insanity. Skip the hybrid nonsense. Find a CTO with some balls.
Nonsense. Renting servers is the easiest way to bankrupt your company. Look at all the capacity shortages going on right now. Price will continue to outpace bare metal and controls will get tighter.
Not to mention there are many scenarios where cloud connectivity is not an option.
I would argue that absolute insanity is surrendering all control of infrastructure to cloud providers. Especially when you are using managed services that lock you in, making any plans of migrating way ridiculously painful.
It takes a CTO with cojones to actually own your infrastructure.
Takes real balls to go with AWS huh?
Still won't help them get out of a relegation fight.
Yes, much needed to survive in Championship next year.
So I know that its VMWare, so the fees will be eyewatering, but 85% reduction is really meaningless in this story.
How much was Tottenham using? Did the 85% actually cover the cost of their new CTO coming in and switching platforms?
It's very vague.
Yeah it means nothing without details. They're a new HPE customer so they might be getting a discount the first year or something.
A friend of mine is a virtualization SME and from what I can tell you don't really save that much on the alternatives. Also, HPE sell VMware. HPE has a modular solution where you can pick the hypervisor you want to use, including VMware.
At my $dayjob we use Proxmox and it's good enough. I think Proxmox would be good enough for most orgs.
But my friend works with the tax agency and they definitely make use of vSAN, NSX, and all those nice features that puts VMware above the competition.
> Tottenham Hotspur (...) has saved over 85 percent in licensing fees by replacing (...) VMware instance with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s VME.
So only a matter of time until they have to migrate again.
This is good for Tottenham, we need that money:
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7542593/2026/09/02/tottenha...
($405M in gross transfer spend in this summer's window)
How much do they spend on players overalls?
85% reduction in VMware fees replaced by some other fees from something else? Or just an overall 85% reduction in cost?
Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682671
Go pricey get slicey!
There is a 100% chance that someone in Broadcom exec team is making money shorting themselves.
Or else some insider assurance that they'd get so much money from government or some big customer that they could run their products into the ground no matter what. But enterprises are not as locked in as people think.
Broadcom has absolutely zero interest in the long-term future of VMware. Their only goal is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible before it goes bust.
Let's say that VMware had a $10B revenue with a $9B operating cost. If 0.1% of their megacorp customers is responsible for 20% of that revenue while only being 1% of the support needs, then ditching the other 99.9% of customers reduces revenue to $2B while the operating cost can be reduced to $90M - increasing profit from $1B to $1.91B.
Those huge customers are quite locked in, so you can squeeze them for a couple of years before they leave. They have their own in-house support teams, so you can cut all L1/L2 support people. You're killing the product, so you can cut all developers except a handful to patch CVEs. The smaller customers who are leaving are doing some after a massive price hike, so you get a nice one-time renewal bonus while they desperately try to move to alternatives.
No need to do any shorting when you're generating massive profits for a couple of years. The plan when VMware is dead? Cut up its corpse in tiny parts, sell them off, buy another company, repeat the same strategy. As long as the total money they manage to extract from VMware is more than its acquisition cost, Broadcom has succeeded.
Unlike Hock Tan, you forgot to raise the prices 5-10x. Then your 0.1% of customers generating 20% of your revenue turn into 0.1% of your customers generating the same amount of revenue as 100% of customers were before with lower operating costs and thus higher margins.
I didn't realize how addicted some orgs were to VMWare until Broadcom bought them and I witnessed zero people migrate to alternatives. It's been one of the single biggest shocks to me in my career. Watching them get squeezed openly and ruthlessly and just accepting it. I've only ever seen Microsoft pull that off before.
I guess that means that VMWare are very skilled in calculating exactly how much they can hike the price / squeeze. Same with oracle, and all the other vendors that play this game.
It kind of makes sense, if you're using VMWare, your choice is to pay a ridiculous but fixed/certain sum, or embark on a risky migration project that probably involves hiring a bunch of people, could take longer than expected, might fail, etc.
“If [virtualization is] not built into a broader AI operation stack, the value is even lower again,” Pickering said.
For the love of god keep Gen AI off of infrastructure...