Tottenham Hotspur cuts VMware licensing fees by 85% with HPE migration
Original: VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent
Why This Matters
Illustrates accelerating enterprise VMware departures following Broadcom's acquisition and pricing restructuring.
Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur has replaced its stadium's VMware virtualization with HPE's Morpheus VM Essentials, reducing licensing fees by over 85%. CTO Rob Pickering cited Broadcom's commercial changes post-acquisition as a key driver, completing the migration over three months.
Tottenham Hotspur, a Premier League soccer club, has migrated its stadium's virtualization infrastructure from VMware to Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) Morpheus VM Essentials (VME), achieving licensing fee savings exceeding 85%. The club confirmed to The Register that its server, storage, and networking infrastructure at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium — which hosts around 63,000 spectators and features 20,000 network access points, 1,849 IPTV screens, and 519 CCTV screens — now runs on HPE GreenLake, underpinned by VME and HPE OpsRamp software. The stadium's data center uses HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers and Alletra Storage MP hardware across six aisles. CTO Rob Pickering told SDxCentral that Morpheus VME's hardware-level capabilities 'far outstrip' VMware's, describing the new platform as 'more capable' overall. Pickering pointed directly to Broadcom's 2023 takeover of VMware as a catalyst: '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 also noted that virtualization must integrate with broader AI operational stacks to deliver value going forward. The migration, completed over approximately three months, is part of a wider stadium data center and network infrastructure redesign that is nearly complete.