Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

UK supermarket giant Tesco has sued Broadcom for breach of contracts pertaining to its VMware licenses, named Computacenter as a co-defendant, and warned it may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped.

Court documents seen by The Register assert that in January 2021 Tesco acquired perpetual licenses for VMware’s vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla’s Tanzu products, and agreed a contract for support services and software upgrades that run until 2026. Tesco claims VMware also agreed to give it an option to extend support services for an additional four years.

All of this happened before Broadcom acquired VMware and stopped selling support services for software sold under perpetual licenses. Broadcom does sell support to those who sign for its new software subscriptions.

The supermarket giant says that means it must pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualisation ...