Kicked out
VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur’s licensing fees by 85 percent
Pro soccer team’s CTO points to “issues with the Broadcom takeover.”
Credit:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Credit:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Tottenham Hotspur, a professional soccer team that’s part of the Premier League, has saved over 85 percent in licensing fees by replacing its stadium’s VMware instance with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s (HPE’s) Morpheus VM Essentials (VME) virtualization software.
Tottenham hasn’t disclosed which VMware products it used or how much it previously paid the Broadcom firm.
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. That is all “underpinned by” VME and HPE’s OpsRamp software for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Rob Pickering, Tottenham’s CTO, told the publication, with HPE in charge of the hybrid cloud-managed service.
Tottenham is almost done with a broader redesign of its stadium’s data center and network infrastructure, The Register reported. The stadium has a data center with six aisles that uses HPE’s ProLiant Compute Gen12 server hardware and Alletra Storage MP. In an announcement this week, HPE noted that Tottenham is using “solutions including HPE Morpheus software and HPE OpsRamp software… to manage a complex, multi-site environment more efficiently while modernizing virtualization platforms and reducing operational overhead.”
“We’re at the right time of our replacement cycles to be looking at those decision points,” Pickering told SDxCentral this week.
“For at least as long as my career in technology, hypervisor has been one of those very unsexy things that you bought from one person and you just sort of got on with it. And you know, with VMware, a 400-pound gorilla in that space, they took some decisions that I think run counter to both the system integrator side and the customer side.”
Migration benefits
Pickering told SDxCentral that Morpheus VME’s “ability to do things on behalf of the hardware far outstrips what VMware can do on that front.”
“So in many ways, it’s more capable,” Pickering added.
He told The Register that “savings is a big part of the reason” for Tottenham’s migration. The organization is saving “north of 85 percent” in licensing fees compared to when it relied on VMware, the executive said.
“We moved away as we put [in] the infrastructure… over the last three months,” Pickering said. “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.”
Tottenham’s CTO said that moving from VMware was about more than saving money.
“If [virtualization is] not built into a broader AI operation stack, the value is even lower again,” Pickering said.
“Having that all connected back into an operation stack that our team can work from—one pane of glass—is worth more than just the savings that come from moving vendor A to vendor B. We do see significant savings from that, but really, it’s all part of the broader story of, ‘How do we put AI ops at the heart of what we do from a technology perspective?’”
In 2025, Pickering said that Tottenham had “a total technology team of about 35 people.” With a team that small, the “ability to use AI operations to proactively see faults and remediate them without the input of a person is really critical,” Pickering told The Register.
