Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware for breach of contract (2025)

Feel like it's burying the lede a bit to not mention that Broadcom acquired Computer Associates and said "hold my beer".

CA was horrible. I worked there but your claims are a little too strong. They bought up and coming products within rising sectors, "over paying" knowing they could cash in. They then introduced those products into their large portfolio of large enterprise clients (who trusted them deeply) giving the purchased products increased market share and real associated profits. They were the trusted technical friend for non technical companies. They did after initial investment then largely and entirely killing innovation on and investment in the products. It was the place that products went to die.

[edit: perhaps it got darker and more cynical after I left. I wouldn't be terribly surprised. I left in 2013, post Enron style accounting fraud, pre sale to Broadcom]

Facebook and good should be at the top of that list for selling scams to users

Broadcom doesn't care. They just want to milk VMware for all it's worth to goose their short-term profits.

I do suspect they'll settle but I doubt it will result in a new contract. They've already made significant investments migrating off VMWare and none of those will snap back with a new contract. Tesco was also cut off from updates and support, and so had to purchase 3rd party support, so they have real damages.

A supermarket with over 3000 (5000 depending where I search) stores probably doesn't want everything in the cloud. They will want every shop to be at least mostly-capable of operating without an internet connection.

1. Tesco is migrating off

2. Tesco had a good deal they paid for ahead of time, with the full support cycle detailed in the contract that Broadcom is refusing to honor.

3. Broadcom is arguing that since Tesco is migrating off, they can't sue for damages. Tesco would probably counter argue that the migration is due to Broadcom not honoring the original contract.

Big ships turn slowly is all. It’s no easy feat to move away from something like that.

because there are no real alternatives. Everything that could be considered an alternative has drawbacks or things that are missing. Proxmox comes close but doesn't offer proper enterprise support contracts, so you'd be stuck with a 3rd party.

Then there's training. you can't easily switch your admins and service desk techs to a different product. That alone takes months, of not years, and costs a lot. Rewrite all processes, etc.

Then there's 3rd party integration. Since VMware was basically the "default", most 3rd party products offered turnkey integration into VMware, and VMware only. Think backup applications or security etc. You don't switch backup vendors easily (for the same reasons - training, features, ...) and if you do consider it, it adds to the cost

This is why, for many companies that don't have 50-100 people or more in their IT department, it's more expensive to switch away from VMware so they grudgingly pay, while trying to move as much workload away from it as possible.

Because there's no business potential.

20 years ago anyone and everyone had datacenters full of VMware. Now most of it is stuff that a company hasn't bothered to move to cloud yet. There's a few things it's still the best choice for but those are niche things. Like stuff that absolutely needs to be self hosted for privacy or security. The time of VMware being the default is long gone.

Moving from a mainstream to a niche product means a market that's shrinking. No growth potential. No potential for new competitors to start up. Proxmox is good but it's not exactly enterprise.

This is why Broadcom bought it and sucks the most value out of it before it completely disappears.

Eh, it's still the least hassle at scale for your own data centers and VCF 9 isn't exactly low tech - it does things no one else really can do to the same level of quality (DRS, HCX, NSX, VSAN all come to mind) , the question is, is it worth the money? Unless you're over 10,000 VMs, probably not.

OpenShift is okay but has quirks unless you have a major Kubernetes staff; Proxmox is good for most but I wouldn't use at massive scale. Azure Stack/ Hyper-V can work but has its own quirks.

Compared to something like proxmox? Sure.

It takes a long time to change corporate mindset.

Comments like this are a sign of someone living in a bubble.

Other than proxmox, what alternative do you have for "high tech"?

Supermarkets probably should use boring tech. They aren't tech companies.