Topgolf has completed a major infrastructure migration, saving $11.3 million by moving 12,000 virtual machines from VMware to VergeIO's VergeOS platform—a direct response to Broadcom's decision to jack up VMware licensing costs by 400 percent.
The pricing shock came after Broadcom eliminated perpetual licenses and consolidated VMware's product line into fewer, pricier SKUs. For a company operating more than 100 venues globally, with infrastructure spanning game venues, offices, labs, and data centers, the math no longer worked.
Scott Forehand, Topgolf's global infrastructure manager, confirmed the savings. The company had been a VMware devotee for decades, running vSphere and ESXi across its fleet, and deployed Dell's VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure in 2017. Forehand even leads the Dallas/Ft. Worth VMware User Group and has participated in VMware customer councils. That loyalty evaporated the moment renewal notices arrived.
Topgolf's new infrastructure sits on VergeOS, a virtualization platform that bundles compute, storage, disaster recovery, and networking into one stack. The company uses VergeOS's Virtual Data Center offering for multi-tenancy across locations. Twenty venues still run VxRail with VMware Cloud Foundation; Forehand expects those migrations to wrap by mid-December.
This is not an isolated defection. VergeIO gains roughly 70 new customers each quarter, most fleeing VMware. George Crump, VergeIO's chief marketing officer, noted that while Topgolf's savings are large due to scale, typical VMware-to-VergeOS switchers see material reductions in software licensing. Many bundle the migration with hardware refreshes—a move that improves the unit economics and justifies the operational lift.
Topgolf's calculus reflects a broader market dynamic: Broadcom's licensing squeeze has made the cost-benefit of hyperconvergence platforms suddenly transparent. When renewal costs spike 400 percent, alternatives that were previously "good enough" become obviously superior.
