Tesco’s latest filing in its legal dispute with Broadcom over contractual obligations for VMware software and support shows that the supermarket giant is actively moving off Broadcom software. The retailer began migration efforts in April 2025 as it progressed with its lawsuit against Broadcom for failing to deliver VMware software and services.
With regards to the replacement for its VMware installation, which is due to be deployed across the business by the end of 2027, Tesco said the timeframe of the migration has created operational and commercial risk, as well as resulting in “material cost and disruption to the business”.
Its latest filing shows how far the technology leadership team at Tesco is prepared to go as it continues its legal case against VMware. Not only is it undertaking a major project to deploy an alternative to VMware virtualisation software across its server estate, but it is also replacing its mainframe business software.
Legal papers filed in February by Dell, which is a defendant in the Tesco/Broadcom lawsuit, show the technology firm’s contractual obligation as a VMware distributor to provide Tesco, through reseller Computacenter, with access to VMware software and support. The original agreement with Computacenter, signed in 2021, gave Tesco access to VMware products and services until January 2026, with an option to renew the contract until 2030. But Broadcom, which provides the products through Dell to Computacenter, is preventing Tesco from accessing the VMware software and services it purchased under the 2021 agreement.
In an amendment to its complaint against Broadcom, filed on 22 May, Tesco said it “has now been forced to start to migrate away from VMware’s products”. The company said it has also begun migrating off the CA Technologies software, which Broadcom provides. Both these decisions are linked, according to the filing, and were taken “under duress in late April 2025 in light of the defendants’ conduct, including Broadcom’s abuse of dominance”.
The Tesco filing shows that the company’s complaint now includes the migration effort, relating to costs associated with migrating both off VMware and CA Technologies mainframe software and services. These include the costs incurred in evaluating and making necessary changes to Tesco’s technology infrastructure to implement the alternative products in what it calls “a rapid timeframe”. It has also incurred costs in hiring third-party suppliers and contractors, and the cost of diverting the internal Tesco team to the migration effort.
Tesco said it has also incurred additional costs because it has had to develop or buy in functionality where certain features or interoperability are not available from other virtualisation software providers. In particular, Tesco said the Veeam backup and Zerto’s data security products it uses are not currently interoperable with any other server virtualisation platforms.
It said that due to Broadcom’s “unlawful behaviour”, support for these products is not available to Tesco through existing Broadcom products. Nor has there been sufficient time for Tesco to plan the migrations, knowing that companies making VMware compatible would eventually support alternative hypervisors.
Tesco’s VMware software and support contract ended in January this year. At the time, Tesco said Broadcom offered to sell the retailer a one-year subscription to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 for £3.5m.
Tesco said that following the expiration of its VMware and Computacenter agreements, and just six weeks before the expiry of its mainframe agreement, it received a £17.4m offer from Broadcom. This bundled VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 and CA Technologies mainframe software and support services for a period of one year.
Tesco said the Broadcom offer was 175% more expensive than the prices it was entitled to under its previous renewal pricing agreement. It also claimed that the mainframe software and support contract pricing works out more than 350% more expensive, given that it expected the renewal price to be around £3m.
