Tesco is leaving VMware behind. When it comes to digital sovereignty, every little helps
News broke this week that Tesco, Britain’s Brobdingnagian supermarket chain, is to undertake a likely painful migration of its virtualisation platform, leaving VMware for an unspecified alternative.
Maybe Broadcom, which swallowed VMware whole in 2023, jacking up licensing costs by what customers could be forgiven for calling near-infinite levels was not such a smart idea after all.
Standard cost creep on subscription software, particularly crucial but dull tech plumbing like virtualisation, is hardly an unknown phenomenon. The pain of moving to a new platform, particularly when your big iron technical debt is weighed rather than countered, has meant software providers have long been able to hold customers captive, but Broadcom’s price rises, which customers have reported as ranging from 150% to 1,500% can hardly be described as drift.
Tesco, hardly alone in complaining, is acting, though - and not only by migrating: the supermarket group is suing Broadcom, with a court date expected in 2027.
Broadcom, for its part, thinks it is doing customers a favour by shoving them into the cloud, according to a report published in The Register. The company’s top brass thinks that using old VMware software sold under perpetual licenses is an “act of corporate self-harm” and that upgrading “quickly pays for itself by improving IT department operations and improving business efficiency.”
This may be true. Maybe. Mostly it is none of Broadcom’s business. The company is free to ditch support for mainframes and on-premise hardware, within the terms of service it agreed to, but putting customers in a half-nelson has never been much of a strategy, even when combined with the promise of loosening it to a gentle hug if you upgrade.
Lock-in is still a thing
What Tesco, and others, have learned is that vendor lock-in is a bad thing. In fact, so determined, apparently, is Broadcom in its rush to prove this that even governments, not least those in the EU, are getting schooled.
There’s a broader lesson here, though: isn’t it time we ditched software subscriptions?
Ongoing costs are not inherently a problem for a business and paying for, for instance, software support is just the cost of doing business. Indeed, support is about the only reasonable cause for ongoing charges on software, assuming you are capable of spinning up a server.
Software companies, though, seem to rather like the balance sheet predictability it brings. Fair enough. After all, it happens on the other side, too. Perhaps we might even call it double entry accounting: businesses love to get capital expenditure down in annual reports, even if that means nothing more than shunting what should be capital spending into the current expenditure column in an act of bookkeeping legerdemain.
But consider what has been lost: perpetual licenses gave companies software they owned, software that kept working (insofar as any software works, which is a lot less than advertised) regardless of vendor decisions. We might call that freedom.
With cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS), vendors can, and increasingly do, change pricing, remove features and change user-interfaces. Worse, they can get acquired or go bankrupt, causing the software to disappear. How any businesses that care about data residency and continuity could ever agree to this is hard to say.
If software companies really want customers off perpetual licences, fine. With a bit of planning, we can just quit using their software altogether.
Cut the cord.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers