Broadcom finds a VMware customer willing to stick around: London Stock Exchange

VMware is still able to keep some corporate customers onside - it has signed a five-year agreement with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) for its Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud platform. According to Broadcom, LSEG has used VMware across parts of its infrastructure for more than a decade, and the latest purchase centers on deploying VCF to support the stock exchange operator's private cloud. Broadcom will also provide professional services to roll out VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 across the organization's IT estate as part of the contract. The Register asked how much this new agreement is worth, but LSEG declined to disclose figures. This is a pertinent question, as many customers of VMware's cloud and virtualization software complain that licensing costs have risen significantly since Broadcom paid $61 billion to buy VMware at the end of 2023 and scrapped perpetual licenses in favor of long-term subscription bundles. In fact, analyst biz Gartner has suggested that for some VMware customers, moving workloads to an IBM mainframe could prove a cheaper option than adopting Broadcom's new licenses. As The Register reported recently, half of VMware users are looking to reduce their use of the virtualization pioneer's products by 2028, as many are not happy with Broadcom's recent strategy of only selling a complete private cloud suite in the form of VCF 9. Previously, companies were able to pick and choose parts of the software stack that suited them. LSEG also declined to reveal its rationale for sticking with VMware, beyond the details disclosed in the announcement. "Extending our use of VMware Cloud Foundation supports an engineered private cloud for our operations, while giving us the flexibility to support new services and workloads as our technology needs evolve," said Andrew Knight, LSEG CIO for Infrastructure and Cloud. The stock exchange operator said the initiative complements its existing cloud partnerships. These include a multi-year deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the preferred cloud provider for its Markets, Risk Intelligence, and FTSE Russell divisions, and an earlier long-term agreement with Microsoft to jointly develop new products and services for its data and analytics business. (R)