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VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

arstechnica.com

21–30 of 48 posts

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#21

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. 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

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#22
post #14

> 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…

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.

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#23
post #14

> 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…

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.

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#24
post #6

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…

Broadcom explained this all to investors at the time of the acquisition.

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#25
post #14

> 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…

> Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has 20,000 network access points, 1,849 IPTV screens, and 519 CCTV screens. It hosts about 63,000 viewers

A decent part of that is probably important to be working on the day of a football match. They already own a suitable building, probably with decent backup power, so running their own servers seems both more reliable and cheaper than renting.

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#26
post #3

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?

Too much for Championship.

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#27
post #12

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.

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.

They tend to be large complex enterprises outside tech. They don’t have the people (from the cto/cio down) to execute a migration well. They tend to have a very poor to mixed history with other tech migrations, and the risk here would be even higher.

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#28
post #14

> 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…

> Obsession with maintaining some degree of physical control over infrastructure drives many organizations to absolute insanity.

Well... thank the current US administration for that one. The move they did with that ICC judge, cutting him off from anything digital, was a wakeup call for us Europeans that we can take nothing for granted any more.

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#29
post #14

> 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…

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.

> Renting servers is the easiest way to bankrupt your company.

I can think of a lot of easier ways.

Re: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent

#30
post #12

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.

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.

Some software companies sort of stumble into treating their customers as hostages while others make an art form of it. Computer Associates, which is part of Broadcom now, has been doing that for decades.
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