Topgolf has saved $11.3 million by migrating 12,000 virtual machines from VMware to VergeIO's VergeOS platform, avoiding a projected 400 percent cost increase after Broadcom's acquisition of the virtualization giant.
The sports entertainment company operated on VMware infrastructure for decades—vSphere, ESXi, and VxRail hyperconverged appliances installed starting in 2017. Scott Forehand, Topgolf's global infrastructure manager, led the Dallas/Ft. Worth VMware User Group and participated in customer councils. The company's dependency on VMware was deep.
But Broadcom's pivot from perpetual licenses to bundled, consumption-based pricing models forced a reckoning. For a company managing 100-plus venues, offices, labs and data centers, the math became brutal. Topgolf calculated that staying on VMware would cost more than switching—a capital allocation decision that tilted hard toward VergeOS.
"The savings are much greater now, considering the cost of a similar solution to our old VxRail configuration," Forehand said. The company completes its full transition by mid-December, with 20 venues still running VxRail.
VergeOS bundles compute, storage, disaster recovery, networking and AI into a single platform. Topgolf uses its Virtual Data Center offering for multi-tenancy—a feature that mattered to their distributed venue model.
George Crump, VergeIO's chief marketing officer, said Topgolf's savings scale is atypical for its size, but the pattern is not. Most VMware migrants see reductions from three levers: eliminating software licensing, ditching proprietary hyperconverged appliances and consolidating separate point tools for backup, replication and multi-site management. VergeIO reports 70 new customer acquisitions per quarter, most arriving from VMware.
The economics matter because they reveal a structural weakness in Broadcom's post-acquisition playbook. Customers with negotiating power—especially those managing distributed infrastructure across many sites—can now model the total cost of ownership against alternatives. That math is driving defection at scale.
