Soccer club slashes virtualization costs after ditching VMware for HPE

Tottenham Hotspur replaced its stadium's VMware-based virtualization with Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Morpheus VM Essentials, cutting licensing fees by over 85 percent. The Premier League club's CTO cited problems stemming from Broadcom's takeover of VMware as a key factor in the decision. The migration is part of a broader data center and network overhaul managed through HPE's GreenLake hybrid cloud platform.

The stadium's infrastructure includes 20,000 network access points, roughly 1,850 IPTV screens, and over 500 CCTV cameras serving about 63,000 spectators per match. The migration, completed over three months, is part of a wider refresh that also introduced HPE ProLiant Gen12 servers and Alletra Storage MP hardware, all managed through the GreenLake platform.

Tottenham's technology team numbers only about 35 people, making automated operations essential. Pickering noted that Morpheus VME handles certain hardware-related tasks more effectively than VMware, and that tying virtualization into a broader AI operations framework delivers value beyond licensing savings alone.