Tesco has warned it “may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped,” which is a grim prospect for shoppers.
Court papers say Tesco bought perpetual licences for VMware vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation in January 2021, plus Tanzu subscriptions, with support and upgrades running to 2026 and an option to extend four years.
All of that predated Broadcom’s VMware acquisition and the outfit stopping standalone support for perpetually licensed software while flogging support only to those who sign up for its subscriptions.
Tesco says the switch forces it to pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualisation software for which Tesco has already paid,” and that it “is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualisation Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without having to purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products which it already owns.”
The complaint adds that upgrade rights in its VMware contracts are being ignored because Broadcom will not let it update perpetual licences to Cloud Foundation 9.
Computacenter is named because Tesco relied on the reseller for licences and claims it breached fixed-price supply commitments tied to those deals.
The filing points to Broadcom’s patch policy, which withholds some security updates and fixes from users without subscriptions, while Tesco insists its contracts entitle it to those updates.
The retailer says VMware software and support “are essential for the operations and resilience of Tesco's business and its ability to supply groceries to consumers across the UK and Republic of Ireland.”
It adds, “VMware Virtualization Software underpins the servers and data systems that enable Tesco's stores and operations to function, hosting approximately 40,000 server workloads and connecting to, by way of illustration, tills in Tesco stores.”
Tesco wants at least $134 million in damages from Broadcom, VMware and Computacenter, plus interest, and warns the tally climbs the longer this bunfight drags on.