Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur has ditched VMware as part of a wider datacenter and network refresh, saving itself more than 85 percent on licensing costs – though its Chief Technology Officer says the decision wasn’t purely financial.

Transforming Spurs into a winning force on the pitch remains a work in progress. Off the pitch, though, the club is nearing the end of a project to overhaul the tech inside its White Hart Lane stadium in north London.

The ground holds almost 63,000 fans and runs more than 1,650 Wi-Fi access points, 840+ under seat access points, 700 Bluetooth beacons, 20,000 network access points with 1,849 IPTV screens and 519 CCTV cameras connected. A six aisle datacenter is also sited within the arena.

Rob Pickering, CTO at Spurs, said that on the server, storage and networking side, the club has switched entirely to the HPE GreenLake portfolio, “underpinned by OpsRamp and Morpheus (VM Essentials).” HPE will run the hybrid cloud managed service.

In the datacenter, Spurs has moved to ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers and HPE Alletra storage MP. Connectivity is being upgraded to WiFi 7 and HPE Aruba Central with self-driving capabilities.

Why migrate from VMware? “Savings is a big part of the reason,” said Pickering. “It’s a significant amount, north of 85 percent,” less than the club was forking out for licensing.

“We moved away as we in put the infrastructure… over the last three months,” he added. “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.”

Since buying VMware in 2023, Broadcom has discontinued certain standalone products in favour of bundles that are often pricier regardless of whether customers use every components. Broadcom seems only focused on VMware’s 10,000 to 30,000 largest customers, out of a base that numbered 350,000 before the takeover.

Pickering framed virtualisation itself as a commodity: “If it’s not built into a broader AI operation stack, the value is even lower again. 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 saving 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.”

He said the tech team at Spurs is relatively small, so the “ability to use AI operations to proactively see faults and remediate them without the input of a person is really critical to us.”

Spurs declined to disclose what it had been paying VMware or which VMware products it used. Pickering did, however, describe HPE VM Essentials (VME) as a “completely capable replacement.”

The Aruba network upgrade is “running late” and should be completed within a month. Getting it right matters as up to about 30,000 fans hop onto the stadium’s Wi-Fi at any given point during a game. The ground also doubles as a concert venue and hosts NFL matches and rugby league games too.

“The process of replacing all of those consistently in a non-impactful way – given the stadium operates really 365 days a year – is one of the hardest challenges of doing any technology project in a stadium. There’s no real window of downtime in stadium.”

Of course there’s the physics too: “A stadium is a giant Faraday cage. It’s glass and steel. It’s very hard to get RF to work. We make sure we build things that ensure the RS signal can travel the distance it needs to. We also need a lot of density to do that… We’re doing like 1,800 access points across the stadium in totality. So it’s significant in terms of the physical engineering challenge to get it in here, but also the radio engineering challenge.”

With Spurs losing its first two Premier League Games despite spending £300 million on new players during the summer, the club’s technology upgrades may be delivering more reliable returns than its transfer business, at least for now.

HPE is taking advantage of VMware’s expensive licensing changes by offering customers free use of its own VM Essentials product for a year, plus a $1 license for its Zerto data protection product to help ease migrations.

The announcement of the deal came at the Partner Growth Summit staged alongside their HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, and framed them as a migration assistance program intended to arm channel partners who want to help customers reduce their financial risk when migrating virtualisation platforms.

“One of the big things we see is that as customers are going through this journey on transforming their operating model, you end up with double expenses and so we’re really pleased to announce the program around Morpheus and platform migration,” said EVP and CTO Fidelma Russo.

“We are announcing that as a customer goes through this transformation with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, you don’t pay for the first year of licenses. You will get Zerto migration licenses during that period to help you move, and so what this does is it helps mitigate the double-bubble cost problem that customers see as they are looking to migrate from one platform to another.”

Neither Russo nor HPE mentioned VMware as part of their pitch for this migration assistance program, but it seems pretty clear where it is aimed.

At its last Discover event in Barcelona, HPE talked about customers seeing license fees for virtualisation skyrocketing and claimed that it was able to provide “a fully integrated enterprise-grade alternative” with Morpheus and OpsRamp management tools, plus Zerto disaster recovery software.

A survey recently found that half of VMware users plan to reduce their use of the virtualisation pioneer’s products by 2028. Since being acquired by Broadcom, VMware license costs have increased by 800 to 1,500 percent for some customers. VMware also ended partner programs that many service providers relied on.

HPE says it is introducing VM Essentials for Partner IT to help providers transition their virtualised business applications. This will see it provide VM Essentials software licenses free of charge for three years, with partners paying only support costs, to the 600 partners who gain Private Cloud with Virtualisation competency by the end of the year.

The company is also extending its channel-only model to cover HPE Private Cloud PC3000 (formerly HPE Private Cloud Business Edition), HPE SimpliVity PC1000, and HPE Zerto software from July 1. HPE said this follows the success of selling Morpheus VM Essentials through a channel-only route to market.

Also at the Partner Growth Summit, the IT biz will disclose that it is unifying the HPE and Juniper Networks partner programs under its Partner Ready Vantage umbrella. The aim is to have a single, global program for partners to offer services across networking, cloud, and AI.

This change will take effect from November 1, after which partners will operate under one program with a simplified structure, aligned incentives, and a consistent engagement model, while existing investments are protected, or so HPE claims.

The company also says it will help cloud service providers build and operate differentiated private cloud services with CloudOps Software and the backing of HPE Partner Ready Vantage.

“Partners want a simpler way to engage and a bigger opportunity to grow,” said Simon Ewington, HPE’s SVP for Worldwide Channel and Partner Ecosystem.