Tottenham cuts VMware licensing fees by over 85 percent

Inside the six-aisle data center at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium, the software underneath the servers has changed. The Premier League club replaced its VMware instance with HPE’s Morpheus VM Essentials (VME), virtualization software; Ars Technica reports that the move saved over 85 percent in licensing fees.

The switch covers more than the software name on a contract. Tottenham confirmed to The Register that its stadium’s server, storage and networking infrastructure moved to HPE solutions delivered through GreenLake, HPE’s hybrid cloud management platform. VME and HPE’s OpsRamp software, which supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments, underpin the setup, while HPE runs the hybrid cloud-managed service.

Rob Pickering, Tottenham’s chief technology officer, told SDxCentral that the timing matched the club’s replacement cycles. He was discussing the hypervisor—the software layer used to run virtual machines—as something technology buyers had traditionally bought from one supplier and left alone, calling VMware “a 400-pound gorilla” in the space. Pickering said VMware’s decisions ran counter to the interests of system integrators and customers.

Tottenham is almost finished with a wider redesign of the stadium’s data center and network infrastructure, The Register reported. The site uses HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 server hardware and Alletra Storage MP; HPE says Morpheus and OpsRamp help manage the complex, multi-site environment while modernizing virtualization platforms and reducing operational overhead.

In practical terms, the immediate gain is for Tottenham’s stadium technology operation: a reported over 85 percent reduction in licensing fees, alongside a managed service covering the hybrid-cloud stack. The move is already in place, and the confirmed scope is the stadium’s infrastructure rather than a stated club-wide migration.

The percentage has a clear limit. Tottenham has not disclosed which VMware products it used or how much it previously paid Broadcom, so the absolute value of the saving cannot be stated. The reported number describes licensing fees; it does not by itself give a total cost for the data-center redesign, which The Register says is almost complete.