Yes, Tesco just dropped a £100 million lawsuit over VMware licensing.
But before you start sharpening your Broadcom pitchforks, take a breath.
Their strategy is Bold, Brutal (at times) and when you zoom out – still strategically sound.
Here’s the situation:
Tesco claims £7 million in perpetual VMware licences have been rendered useless. They say patches have stopped, upgrades are blocked and support is gone so now they’re suing Broadcom, VMware, and Computacenter for £100 million. Ouch.
But this isn’t just about Tesco is it? – It’s about how Broadcom’s licensing pivot has landed across critical infrastructure from finance to retail to public services.
And while we’re still betting on Broadcom’s long game, we’re not ignoring the backlash…
But it’s worth noting: not everyone’s reaching for the lawyers.
EMEA CTO Joe Baguley recently pointed out that 87% of VMware’s top 10,000 customers have already signed up for VMware Cloud Foundation, which suggests the pricing shift isn’t sparking a mass exodus.
So maybe the question isn’t “why is Broadcom doing this?”
It’s “why is Tesco kicking off when most of the enterprise world has already moved on?”
Coming Soon: State of Systems x Joe Baguley
In three weeks, we’re joined by Joe Baguley, VMware CTO EMEA.
What should we ask?
- What really changed — and why?
- Could this transition have been handled better?
- Is customer trust recoverable after this kind of blowback?
Got a question for Joe? Drop it below. We’ll ask the sharpest ones…
Want to know more about VMWare? See more here: https://r-comconsulting.com/partners/vmware/
To find the full read on Tesco suing Brodcom, you can read the full article here.