Report: Tesco sues Broadcom

The Register is reporting that 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, adds The Register.

The supermarket giant says Broadcom's subscriptions mean it must pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualisation software for which Tesco has already paid,” and “is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualisation Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without also having to purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products which it already owns.”

The complaint also alleges that Tesco’s contracts with VMware include eligibility for software upgrades, but that Broadcom won’t let the retailer update its perpetual licenses to cover the new Cloud Foundation 9.

The filing names Computacenter as a co-defendant as it was the reseller that Tesco relied on for software licenses, and the retailer feels it’s breached contracts to supply software at a fixed price.

Read more on The Register.