Tottenham Hotspur ditches VMWare in favor of HPE — cuts licensing costs by 85 percent | usagoldmines.com

• Tottenham Hotspur just confirmed plans to migrate from VMware to HPE, saving 85% off its bill
• CTO Rob Pickering revealed that Broadcom-era changes are largely to blame
• The stadium is also undergoing a broader HPE upgrade

Tottenham Hotspur has phased out VMware at its stadium as part of a major infrastructure overhaul. By moving to HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, the London football team managed to cut virtualization costs by more than 85%.

According to Ars Technica, CTO Rob Pickering explicitly pointed toward the commercial changes following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.

But for Tottenham, the migration was just one part of a major data center and networking refresh, with the company also shifting its server, storage and networking infrastructure – incidentally, to HPE.

Tottenham moves from VMware to HPE, saves 85%

Though the team didn’t reveal how much it paid for which products with VMware, Pickering did say the saving was a “significant amount” and “north of 85%.”

“The issues with the Broadcom takeover of VMware are well-known in terms of the commercial changes to their structure and the way that they engage with clients,” he added.

Tottenham also confirmed that integrating virtualization, infrastructure and automation into one single operational stack ultimately led to more value than simply swapping one virtualization vendor for another to save money, hence the decision to go all-in on HPE.

Earlier this summer, HPE announced that it would be offering prospective customers a year’s free HPE Morpheus VM Essentials for customers switching from VMware to help ease the cost involved with migration. Its Zerto migration software was also confirmed to be part of a $1 package.

It’s unclear whether Tottenham Hotspur took advantage of those offers.

At the same time, the stadium is also said to have started a major network upgrade toward Wi-Fi 7 and HPE Aruba Central in a stadium with around 20,000 network access points and connections.

More broadly, Tottenham Hotspur isn’t the only business turning its back on VMware – UK supermarket giant Tesco also confirmed plans to dump 40,000 VMware licenses.